217 quotes
Every day America's destroyed and re-created,
America is what you do,
America is I and you,
America is what you choose to make it.
As a rule,
It was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.
Another Time (1940)
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Another Time (1940)
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
Another Time (1940)
The actual self
Round whom time revolves so fast
Is so afraid of what its motions might possibly do
That the actor is never there when his really important
Acts happen.
Let us then
Consider rather the incessant Now of
The traveler through time, his tired mind
Biased towards bigness since his body must
Exaggerate to exist, possessed by hope.
The Age of Anxiety (1948)
I never write when I'm drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn't like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn't like slavish devotion — then she lies.
The Art of Poetry No. 17 (1972)
There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, "Did you get an erection?" If the answer is "Yes" from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.
The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (1991)
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970)
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Another Time (1940)
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to their graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.
Look, Stranger! (1936) · On This Island (1937)
Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain's lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.
Look, Stranger! (1936) · On This Island (1937)
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Another Time (1940)
Put the car away; when life fails
What's the good of going to Wales?
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
Poems (1933)
O it's broken the lock and splintered the door,
O it's the gate where they're turning, turning;
Their boots are heavy on the floor
And their eyes are burning.
Look, Stranger! (1936) · On This Island (1937)
An important Jew who died in exile.
Another Time (1940)
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work "comes" to him.
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
The Shield of Achilles (1955)
And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses
Itching to boil their children. Only his verses
Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working.
Another Time (1940)
One rational voice is dumb: over a grave
The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved.
Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
Another Time (1940)