Skip to content

Poetry Quote by W.H. Auden

“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.” quote by W.H. Auden — Download Open image

““For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.””

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.7 out of 5 (9 ratings)

Poetry

More by W.H. Auden

“Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence; Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part. They taught me to express my…

Image

“As his wife, Emilia must know Iago better than anybody else. She does not know, any more than the others, that he is malevolent,…

Image

“A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of…

Image

“No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive,…

Image

“Human "nature" is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before.”

Image

“Cassio is a ladies’ man, that is to say, a man who feels most at home in feminine company where his looks and good…

Image

“Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave…

Image

“In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they…

Image

“Healing is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”

Image

“For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a…

Image

“Sorry, my dear, one mustn't be bohemian!”

Image

“Our hunting fathers told the story Of the sadness of the creatures, Pitied the limits and the lack Set in their finished features; Saw…

Image

Explore all 89 W.H. Auden quotes

More Poetry quotes

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

Image

The name Phenomenal Woman was inspired by Maya Angelo, who wrote 'Phenomenal Woman', a favorite poem of mine.

Image

A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the…

Samuel R. Delany

Image

“Time gives poetry to a battlefield...”

Image

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Image

“It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the…

Image

The word 'mundane' has come to mean 'boring' and 'dull', and it really shouldn't - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes from…

Richard Dawkins

Image

“In the streets, the children scream, the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed,” he crooned, putting down the metal grill tongs to take my…

Alexandria Clarke

Image

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the…

Washington Irving

Image

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

Image

All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Image

The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains…

James A. Garfield

Image

Browse all 21,367 Poetry quotes