W. H. Auden Poet Quotations

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse

Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?