46 quotes
...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
...whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
...the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
[W.H.] Auden has gone in the right direction, and a great deal too far.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not — or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life — in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access — unwillingly accuses our lives.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
...I simply don’t want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle, on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair — holding his wrists like Lifar — and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets — one they learned at college — and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who “held the mirror up to nature” would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention — the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on — is as much of a signature as anything in it.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Since Pharaoh’s bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings — patient or impatient, but dyings — have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is “taught to live” by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad — and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation, a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what their wives wear and drink and want, and so on.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
[Alexander North] Whitehead is supposed to have said of, Bertrand] Russell: “Bertie thinks me muddleheaded and I think Bertie simple-minded.”
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
The characteristic poetic strategy of our time — refine your singularities — is something Auden has not learned; so his best poems are very peculiarly good, nearly the most interesting poems of our time. When he writes badly, we can afford to be angry at him, and he can afford to laugh at us.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit — is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, “personalized”, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)