wh auden Archives | Neel Burton

The Poet in His Own Words

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) was one of the great poets of the twentieth century: technically dazzling, psychologically acute, and unusually quotable.

His famously furrowed face seemed almost to embody the life he had lived. Auden himself described it best:

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

—Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography

Auden had the poet’s gift of compressing a large and complicated truth into a handful of words. His own definition of poetry might equally serve as a definition of his genius:

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

—The Poet and the City, in The Dyer’s Hand

As a young man at Oxford, he told the aspiring poet Stephen Spender:

Art is born of humiliation.

—Stephen Spender, World Within World

Humiliation may puncture our pretensions, but it also reveals us to ourselves. In The Sea and the Mirror, Auden offers two brilliantly concise injunctions:

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

—The Sea and the Mirror

He could be particularly sharp on reason, action, and their failure:

Those who will not reason
Perish in the act:
Those who will not act
Perish for that reason.

—Under Which Lyre

And on fame:

Fame often makes a writer vain,
But seldom makes him proud.

—Who’s Who

Auden was no less penetrating on self-deception. The person we pretend to be for ourselves, he observed, is not quite the person we pretend to be for others:

The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.

—Hic et Ille, in The Dyer’s Hand

He was hardly more sentimental about work:

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office every day. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.

—The Table Talk of W. H. Auden, 11 December 1946

Or about relationships:

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 partners run out of goods.

—The Poet and the City, in The Dyer’s Hand

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

—Enchantment, in A Certain World

But Auden’s wit and intelligence were grounded in a profound understanding of suffering. In Musée des Beaux Arts, inspired by Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, he observes how private catastrophe unfolds amid the indifference of ordinary life:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position.

—Musée des Beaux Arts

His love poetry is no less clear-eyed. In Funeral Blues, love becomes an entire world—and grief its extinction:

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 that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

—Funeral Blues

Yet disenchantment did not make Auden cynical. If love could be unequal, the answer was not to love less:

If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

—The More Loving One

Auden’s genius lay in this marriage of disenchantment and affirmation. He saw vanity in fame, self-interest in relationships, indifference around suffering, and mortality within love—but still found reasons to create, to love, and, finally, to praise: