131 quotes
If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets — and, in a better world, it may be; but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don’t have the pearls.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
...our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning...
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
...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)
...the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it...
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
...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)
The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn’t arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along...
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
And the world said, Child, you will not be missed.
You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road;
Your death is a table in a book.
You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you:
Man is the judgment of the world.
Blood for a Stranger (1942)
It is G.E. Moore at the spinet.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
[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)
...to Americans English manners are far more frightening than none at all...
Pictures from an Institution (1954)