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Auden Quotes

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Auden Quotes

“What do you think of when you think of mourning?' Jenny asks. The question snaps me back to attention. I answer without really thinking. "I guess 'Funeral Blues' by W.H. Auden. I think it was Auden. I suppose that's not very original.' 'I don't know it.' 'It's a poem.' 'I gathered.' 'I'm just clarifying. It's not a blues album.' Jenny ignores my swipe at her intelligence. 'Does your response need to be original? Isn't that what poetry is for, for the poet to express something so personal that it ultimately is universal?' I shrug. Who is Jenny, even new Jenny, to say what poetry is for? Who am I for that matter? 'Why do you thin of that poem in particular?' "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, / Silence the pianos and with muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.' I learned the poem in college and it stuck.”

DeathPoetryDyingPoemTherapyMourningAudenWh Auden
Book:Lily and the Octopus
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“(With perhaps pardonable exaggeration, Auden remarked of Kierkegaard that one 'could read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.') And for Auden this deficiency is properly described as theological: Kierkegaard, and other Christian thinkers who share his disregard for embodied human nature, neglect clear and vital Christian teaching about God's redeeming love for this physical world, this whole Creation. (The Poet's Prose)”

Human NatureGod S LoveAudenKierkegaard
Book:Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant
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“Much later in his life, Auden would borrow a musical metaphor from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and say that Kierkegaard was a 'monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament -- in his case, the theme of suffering and sacrifice -- but is deaf to its rich polyphony.' And for the Auden who emerges in the pages of this volume [Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955], the unique power of Christian doctrine is its polyphonic character, its capacity to address every dimension of our being, to give a comprehensive account of how history and nature relate, and -- decisively in Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection -- how they may be reconciled. (The Poet's Prose)”

Human NatureReconciliationChristian DoctrineAudenKierkegaardBonhoefferPolyphonyMonody
Book:Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant
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“As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, through faith and grace, a unique 'existential' relation to God, and few since St. Augustine have described this relation more profoundly than Kierkegaard. But every man has a second relation to God which is neither unique nor existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, is related by necessity to the God who created that universe and saw that it was good, for the laws of nature to which, whether he likes it or not, he must conform are of divine origin. And it is with this body, with faith or without it, that all good works are done. (W.H. Auden) (The Poet's Prose)”

FaithHuman NatureAudenGood WorksKierkegaardAugustine Of HippoGod S CreationMan As Organism
Book:Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant
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“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”

WritingMayPoetryNightFallSpringSeasonsWinterAlcoholCoffeeTeaApplesWritersAutumnPoetsSeptemberPopeInsomniaAprilMiltonSeasonByronAppleNocturnalMorrisShelleyWordsworthAudenTennysonBurnsKeatsSchillerLongfellowHart CraneDe La MareSpender
Book:When Found, Make a Verse of
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“There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.”

IfsSometimesSeemsMightAttitudeDoubtPositionPoetReaderGood ThingsFantasticNot SureNo DoubtClayRemarksFertileMuddleAuden
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.”

FeelsShouldBookMatterUseLife IsLiteratureNamesTermLinesAliveSeaSubjectsParticularTastePaperLowsFlowWarmSmellBeerImpulseBetrayTypicalIrrelevantAccustomedMundaneGrandeurPortOnionsAudenQuinceTerm Life
Book:Brown: The Last Discovery of America
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“Auden, who asked two things of an imagined world-that it be somehow like ours and somehow unlike-would be Ben Marcus's ideal reader, yet even without the poet's dire program, I am altogether taken by this hilarious and sexy alternative universe. Just imagine! it is all done with words instead of mirrors, so much more reliable and so much more heartbreaking. Thus Prospero enthralls his crew.”

WorldTwoDoneWould BeUniverseTakenImaginePoetReaderIdealsProgramMirrorsSexyAlternativesTwo ThingsCrewHeartbreakingAudenProspero
Author:Richard Howard
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“Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here.”

ChildrenWarEnoughBeautifulRomanceSoundAnimalToo MuchFlowerColdMusic IsDrivingBlockRejectionSubtleCashCynicalDefeatedPotatoesRelentlessWriter's BlockDevotionalPantiesSanguineAudenSlinkies
Author:Nick Cave
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“We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.”

IfsSometimesMatterWholeBodyChristianEasyDifficultReligiousViewsModernIntellectualTraditionalReligious FaithHolisticAberrationAuden
Author:Kathleen Norris
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“The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish’.”

PeopleIfsMaySaidImportantFactsTodayLove IsSupportPoetConcernAnd LoveFoundationCaringSecureLove Each OtherGreat PoetAudenSupport And Love
Author:Mitch Albom
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“‎W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is--and always will be--ourselves.”

NeedsMayMeanTwoCountryMightPastTermCenturyKeysPeriodsRuinsArchivesAuden
Author:Ian Mortimer
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“The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had.”

PeopleWorldLooksMovingHouseBlackLosesWhitePureStonesEarsWaveConservativeRingsSnowWeatherDumbDryGrayTransformedUglinessCrystalsBudNumbBleakLosing YourselfCanalsVerticalEuphemismVeneerAuden
Book:The Journals of Sylvia Plath
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