Dismantle the sun, pour away the ocean and sweep up the…

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun.

— Anonymous

“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep…

— W.H. Auden

“He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my…

— W.H. Auden

“As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play…

— Philip Pullman

“A good poem doesn't need to rhyme or have fancy words. It needs to touch the reader, hug them when arms cannot do the…

— Goldie Nanwani

A good poem has its own life. It's like bringing a child into the world. You, the poet, birthed the child, but the child…

— David Whyte

You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of…

— Nick Cave

Auden, who asked two things of an imagined world-that it be somehow like ours and somehow unlike-would be Ben Marcus's ideal reader, yet even…

— Richard Howard

“Almost, I thought. Out loud I said, "Just because we don't see eye to eye on everything doesn't mean we can't be close. Auden”

— Sarah Dessen

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.

— Clive James

Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.

— Cynthia Ozick

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

— Carol Ann Duffy

W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say…

— Ian Mortimer

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the…

— Richard Rodriguez

The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is…

— Michael Jackson