Paul McFedries, Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture (New York: Broadway Books, 2004) ch. 4, p. 58. Amplifying the title of Auden's long poem The Age of Anxiety (1947). Compare: Douglas Bush, Engaged & Disengaged (1966) p. 18
More quotes by W. H. Auden
To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
Let us honor if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
Attribution
Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: W. H. Auden (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.