Extended excerpt  [Essay]:

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. Whether this love is a sign of his poetic gift or the gift itself – for falling in love is given not chosen – I don’t know, but it is certainly the sign by which one recognizes whether a young man is potentially a poet or not.” (p. 171)

Source: Library – Poets at Work: Essays Based on the Modern Poetry Collection at the Lockwood Memorial Library, University of Buffalo (1948) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 426195712

Extended excerpt  [Poem]:

“All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual Man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings group the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.”

Source link: “The Original Versions of Two of Auden’s Most Beloved Poems” (October 1939|eVersion 2018) online via The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/113208/wh-auden-poems-september-1-1939-and-memory-wb-yeats

Source note: This updated, online version of the original New Republic print edition also includes Auden’s poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” As of March 2018, the updated version also shows a date of 8 October 1939 – the “September 1, 1939” poem, however, was published on 18 October 1939.

Re-quote note: When this featured quote from “Herman Melville” is cited outside of the context of the original poem, a comma is sometimes included where the poetry line break is found:

“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

Extended excerpt  [Poem]:

“Evil is unspectacular and always human

And shares our bed and eats at our own table,

And we are introduced to Goodness every day.

Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;

he has a name like Billy and is almost perfect

But wears a stammer like a decoration:

And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;

It is the Evil that is helpless like a love

And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,

And both are openly destroyed before our eyes.”

Source note: Auden dedicated “Herman Melville” to his friend Lincoln Kirstein. Kirstein was an author, art collector, philanthropist, and co-founder of the New York City ballet.

Source: Library – W.H. Auden, Collected Poems (2007 Modern Library edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-0-679-64350-0

Extended excerpt  [Essay]:

“Goodness is easier to recognize than to define; only the greatest novelists can portray good people. For me, the least unsatisfactory description is to say that any thing or creature is good which is discharging its proper function, using its powers to the fullest extent permitted by its environment and its own nature – though we must remember that “nature” and “environment” are intellectual abstractions from a single, constantly changing reality.” (p. 3)

Source note: The book I Believe was a philosophical follow-up to the publisher’s 1931 publication Living Philosophies. In both the earlier book and the 1939 text cited here, the editor invited a number of public figures to contribute a short “personal credo” for publication:

“Briefly, we should like to secure from you a statement of your personal credo; that is to say, a statement of your convictions and beliefs concerning the nature of the world and of man. In a sense, this would be a spiritual and intellectual last will and testament to our generation – a brief apologia, necessarily subjective, touching intimately on your own hopes and fears, the mainsprings of your faith or the promptings of your despair.” (Introduction, p. ix)

W.H. Auden was one of twenty-one contributors to the 1939 I Believe series.

Source note: The I Believe series of 1939 was produced in conjunction with The Nation magazine. Auden’s essay was also included in an Omnibook magazine excerpt of I Believe: “My Belief,” (1939) Omnibook magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 1, New York: Omnibook, Inc., p. 6, column 2.

Source: Editor’s copy – I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time (1939) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 221119204

Re-quote note: When this featured quote from “Herman Melville” is cited outside of the context of the original poem, a comma is sometimes included where the poetry line break is found:

“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

Extended excerpt  [Poem]:

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.” (p. 82)

Source: Library – Another Time (1940) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 187258

Extended excerpt  [Poem. Stanza two.]:

“How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.”

Source note: You can hear Auden reading “The More Loving One” on the following NPR audio recording:

[Audio & transcript] “Auden Reads ‘The More Loving One’ (17 February 2007) Debbie Elliott, ‘All Things Considered,’ NPR: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7474255

Source link [Featured source]: “The More Loving One” (April 1958) Esquire; online via Esquire Archives [subscription service]: http://archive.esquire.com/issue/19580401#!&pid=82

Source link: [Audio & transcript]: “Auden Reads ‘The More Loving One’ (17 February 2007) Debbie Elliott, ‘All Things Considered,’ NPR: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7474255

“It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in what direction to point that organ.”

~W.H. Auden, English-American poet

“Writing” (1962) The Dyers Hand, New York: Vintage Books Edition, February 1968, Part I: Prologue, p. 21; online via Open Library [free subscription service] openlibrary.org

Extended excerpt: [Full sentence cited, from Auden chapter of brief anecdotes & thoughts on writing.]

“It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in what direction to point that organ.” (p. 21)

Source link: Library – The Dyers Hand (1962|1968 Vintage Books ed.) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/dyershandothe00aude#page/21/mode/1up/search/nose

Extended excerpt [From Auden’s essay on the author D.H. Lawrence]:

“Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind; at every moment he adds to and thereby modifies everything that had previously happened to him. Hence the difficulty of finding a single image which can stand as an adequate symbol for man’s kind of existence.” (p. 278)

Source link: Library – The Dyers Hand (1962|1968 Vintage Books ed.) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/dyershandothe00aude#page/278/mode/1up/search/history-making

Extended excerpt  [Auden’s commentary in a collection of anecdotes and quotations by other authors. This cited commentary appears under a quote Auden attributed to Karl Kraus: “Politics is what a man does in order to conceal what he is and what he himself does not know.”]:

“Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. All teachers know this. In consequence, they bowdlerize, but to bowdlerize political history is not to simplify but to falsify it. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.” (p. 182)

Source: Editor’s copy – A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) Standard Book Number (SBN) 670-20994-5

Extended excerpt  [Full sentence cited, from Auden chapter of brief anecdotes & thoughts on writing.]:

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.” (p. 10)

Source link: Library – The Dyers Hand (1962|1968 Vintage Books ed.) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/dyershandothe00aude#page/10/mode/1up/search/some+books+are

Extended excerpt  [From chapter of brief Auden anecdotes & thoughts on writing. Italics original to cited text.]:

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?” (p. 19)

Source link: Library – The Dyers Hand (1962|1968 Vintage Books ed.) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/dyershandothe00aude#page/19/mode/1up/search/confuse+authenticity

Extended excerpt [Yale University banquet speech. Text style as shown in cited source]:

“To-day the number of facts which are accessible are prodigious. Newspapers, radios, libraries pour over us every moment of our lives their stupendous floods of information so that perhaps the greatest educational problem of to-day is how to teach people to ignore the irrelevant, how to refuse to know things, before they are suffocated. For too many facts are as bad as none at all. Were I ever to write a volume for that famous How To series, it would be on How not to read more than 1500 words a day.” (p. 123)

Source note: A brief Yale Daily News article & excerpts of Auden’s banquet speech can be viewed via ““News” Banquet Hears Poet Auden Survey Education” (6 March 1941) Yale Daily News, Vol. LXIV, No. 126, pp. 1-3 & 5; online via Yale University Library Digital Collections: http://digital.library.yale.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/yale-ydn/id/17899/rec/223

Source: Library – The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, Vol. II [1939-1948] (2002) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-691-08935-3

Source link [Yale Daily News speech excerpts]: ““News” Banquet Hears Poet Auden Survey Education” (6 March 1941) Yale Daily News, via Yale University Library Digital Collections: http://digital.library.yale.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/yale-ydn/id/17899/rec/223

Extended excerpt [Poem]:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. […]

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

Source note: The first stanza of the excerpt shown above (“Stop all the clocks…”) originally appeared in the 1936 play The Ascent of F6 by Auden and Christopher Isherwood. The additional stanzas cited here, however, did not appear in that version.

A brief overview of the “Stop all the Clocks”/“Funeral Blues” – plus images of the original text – can be viewed on the following British Library page:

“An introduction to ‘Stop all the clocks’’ (25 May 2016) Seamus Perry, The British Library; online via British Library, ‘Discovering Literature: 20th Century’: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-stop-all-the-clocks

Source link: “Funeral Blues” (1940) Another Time; page image online via The British Library: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-stop-all-the-clocks

Extended excerpt:

Source link:

Extended excerpt [Essay]

“Intolerance is an evil and has evil consequences we can never accurately foresee and for which we shall always have to suffer; but there are occasions on which we must be prepared to accept the responsibility of our convictions. We must be as tolerant as we dare – only the future can judge whether we were tyrants or foolishly weak – and if we cannot dare very far, it is a serious criticism of ourselves and our age.”

Source note: The book I Believe was a philosophical follow-up to the publisher’s 1931 publication Living Philosophies. In both the earlier book and the 1939 text cited here, the editor invited a number of public figures to contribute a short “personal credo” for publication:

“Briefly, we should like to secure from you a statement of your personal credo; that is to say, a statement of your convictions and beliefs concerning the nature of the world and of man. In a sense, this would be a spiritual and intellectual last will and testament to our generation – a brief apologia, necessarily subjective, touching intimately on your own hopes and fears, the mainsprings of your faith or the promptings of your despair.” (Introduction, p. ix)

W.H. Auden was one of twenty-one contributors to the 1939 I Believe series.

Source note: The I Believe series of 1939 was produced in conjunction with The Nation magazine. Auden’s essay was also included in an Omnibook magazine excerpt of I Believe: “My Belief,” (1939) Omnibook magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 1, New York: Omnibook, Inc., p. 7, column 1

Source: Editor’s copy – I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time (1939) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 221119204

Extended excerpt [Poem. Full stanza cited.]

“We would rather be ruined than changed

We would rather dies in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.” (p. 123)

Source: Library – The Age of Anxiety (1947|1949 2nd impression) Online Computer Library Center No. 19102621

Extended excerpt: [Essay. Excerpt appears under Auden’s points on “The Two Chimerical Worlds.”]

“Without Art, we could have no notion of Liberty; without Science no notion of Equality; without either, therefore, no notion of Justice.

Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods.” (p. 62)

Source link: Library – The Dyers Hand (1962|1968 Vintage Books ed.) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/dyershandothe00aude#page/62/mode/1up/search/without+art

Extended excerpt

Source link: “The Fabian Figaro” (23 October 1942) The Commonweal, Issue 13 – http://www.unz.org/Pub/Commonweal-1942oct23

Source link: [Audio excerpt of John Foster Hall recording] “We are all here on earth to help others” (No date provided) W.H. Auden Society: http://audensociety.org/vivianfoster.html