Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen. — Carol Ann Duffy Copy Share Image
The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling. — George Orwell Copy Share Image
“Dismantle the sun, pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods: For nothing now can ever come to any good…” The… — Lori Ryan Copy Share Image
One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to… — Clive James Copy Share Image
“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… — Sarah Dessen Copy Share Image
You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly… — Nick Cave Copy Share Image
I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended… — Jonathan Safran Foer Copy Share Image
“Why should I even bother? What's the point, really?" He thought for a moment. "Who says there has to be a point?"… — Sarah Dessen Copy Share Image
“Like so many women, her life seemed to be all about the needs of others. Auden had said something about that, she… — Alexander McCall Smith Copy Share Image
I think it was W.H. Auden who said he was lucky that his first favorite poet was Thomas Hardy, who was a… — David Duchovny Copy Share Image
“As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems… — Philip Pullman Copy Share Image
W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One… — Ian Mortimer Copy Share Image
Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to… — Nick Cave Copy Share Image
A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." -… — Robert Frost Copy Share Image
The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If… — Mitch Albom Copy Share Image
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,… — Richard Howard Copy Share Image
There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view… — Kathleen Norris Copy Share Image
The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging,… — Michael Jackson Copy Share Image
The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The… — Sylvia Plath Copy Share Image
“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it… — Helen Bevington Copy Share Image
Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough. — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share Image
When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all. — Tom Stoppard Copy Share Image
“for once in our lives / Everything became a You and nothing was an It.” — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
Soyinka's Death at Dawn, Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts, Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning and Wislawa Szymborska's Some People come to… — Ama Ata Aidoo Copy Share Image
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm… — J. Courtney Sullivan Copy Share Image
When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way.… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to… — Stephen Dunn Copy Share Image
“Nope.' He sat back. 'Just been there, done that. Done that getting hauled to the police station thing because of it, too.I… — Sarah Dessen Copy Share Image
