Auden Flashcards
Auden on love in his poems
‘all the poems I have written were written for love’
Auden concluding ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’
‘every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things…. But there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening’
Auden’s questions
‘the first is technical: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” The second is, in the broadest sense, moral: “What kind of guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place? His notion of the Evil One? What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal even from himself?
Auden on the Self
‘man became self-conscious; he began to feel, I am I, and you are not I; we are shut inside ourselves and apart from each other’
Auden on Rhetoric (September, 1939)
‘infected with an incurable dishonesty - and must be scrapped’
Auden on inauthenticity
‘my own devil of inauthenticity, false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities’
Auden on the Enemy 1939 (unpublished book)
‘The Enemy was and still is the Politican’
Auden in Outline for Boys and Girls and their Parents
‘People write in order to be read’
Auden’s journal on fun
‘The only reason for doing anything is for fun’
When did Auden set sail for New York?
1939
When did Auden become religious?
from 1944
When was WW2
1939-45
When was the Spanish Civil War?
1936-1939
Auden on deception in love
‘Love is the subject in which we deceive ourselves the most’
Auden doesn’t consider himself to be a ‘prophet’ but an
interpreter of society
