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Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not. -- Peter Porter
I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican. -- Stevie Smith
The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling. -- George Orwell
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen. -- Carol Ann Duffy
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough. -- Stephen Greenblatt
One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him. -- Clive James
You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom. -- Nick Cave
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. -- J. Courtney Sullivan
I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think." -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas. -- Cynthia Ozick
The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent. -- Christopher Hitchens
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats." -- J. Courtney Sullivan
Soyinka's Death at Dawn, Auden's MusÃ©e des Beaux Arts, Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning and Wislawa Szymborska's Some People come to mind immediately. But there are plenty, plenty more that I enjoy. -- Ama Ata Aidoo
I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse. -- Amy Bloom
The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead. -- Michael Jackson
A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." - W. H. Auden "A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. -- Robert Frost
We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy. -- Kathleen Norris
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, yet even without the poet's dire program, I am altogether taken by this hilarious and sexy alternative universe. Just imagine! it is all done with words instead of mirrors, so much more reliable and so much more heartbreaking. Thus Prospero enthralls his crew. -- Richard Howard
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. -- W. H. Auden

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