22 quotes
The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.
Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.
Legal Fiction (1928)
Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul.
This Last Pain (1930)
There is a supreme God in the ethnological section; . . .
His smooth wood creeps with all the creeds of the world.
Homage to the British Museum (1935)
Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.
Bacchus (1935)
Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
All those large dreams by which men long live well
Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell.
Liberal hopefulness
Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.
Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves;
Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems;
Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.
Arachne (1928)
To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
Missing Dates (1937)
Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death
Making death their ideal basis for different ideals.
The Communists however disapprove of death
Except when practical.
Ignorance of Death (1940)
It is the pain, it is the pain, endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.
Villanelle (1928)
Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet
Revere; do not presume to think her wasted.
Project her no projectile, plan nor man it;
Gods cool in turn, by the sun long outlasted.
To an Old Lady (1928)
Feign then what's by a decent tact believed
And act that state is only so conceived,
And build an edifice of form
For house where phantoms may keep warm.
Stars how much further from me fill my night.
Strange that she too should be inaccessible,
Who shares my sun. He curtains her from sight,
And but in darkness is she visible.
Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend,
Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end,
Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend,
Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?
Just a Smack at Auden (1937)
Your rights reach down where all owners meet, in Hell's
Pointed exclusive conclave, at earth’s centre
(Your spun farm's root still on that axis dwells);
And up, through galaxies, a growing sector.
It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can't
Tell or remember even what they were. The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.
Let It Go (1949)
The waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity.