for once in our lives / Everything became a You and…

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 high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

— George Orwell

The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray…

— Sylvia Plath

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

— Anonymous

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

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

— Carol Ann Duffy

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

— Cynthia Ozick

“Dismantle the sun, pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods: For nothing now can ever come to any good…” The poem by…

— Lori Ryan

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

“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

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

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

“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

“Why should I even bother? What's the point, really?" He thought for a moment. "Who says there has to be a point?" he asked.…

— Sarah Dessen