Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England in 1907 and died in Vienna, Austria in 1973 aged 66.
Although born in England, W. H. Auden later became an American citizen, and is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of poetry of the 20th century.
His work is very stylistic and deals with moral and political issues. The main themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings.
Auden grew up in and near Birmingham, England in a professional middle-class family. His early poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s were written in a style that alternated between telegraphic modern and fluent traditional.
He moved to the United States in 1939 and in 1946 he became an American citizen. The focus of many of his poems from the 1950s and 1960s was on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions.
The quotations selected by our LifeDaily team are an indication of the eclectic outlook of W. H. Auden:
- We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.
- Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
- Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
- In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
- All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
- No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
- God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
- History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
- A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.
- Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
- My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
- Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
- Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
- When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
- Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
Apart from his poems, Auden was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects.
He also enjoyed writing librettos for operas and he worked at various times on documentary films and poetic plays.
Are you familiar with any of his work? If not, do the quotes we have selected encourage you to search them out?
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