Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907-73)
From W. H. Auden, "Squares and Oblongs," from Poets at Work, ed. Charles D. Abbott, New York, 1948, pp. 171-81. Harcourt, Brace & World.
"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."
"In the course of many centuries a few labor-saving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen--alcohol, coffee, tobacco, benzedrine--but these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down. Writing poetry in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand."
"A society which really was like a poem and embodied all the esthetic values of beauty, order, economy, subordination of detail to the whole effect, would be a nightmare of horror, based on selective breeding, extermination of the physically or mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars."
"All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state."
"Faust is damned, not because he has sinned, but because he made a pact with the Devil, that is, like a poet he planned a life of sin beforehand."
"Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful but because it is like himself."