Poetry Quote by W.H. Auden — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“Base words are uttered only by the base”

“I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?”

“no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.”

“The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.”

“We must love one another or die”

“Poetry makes nothing happen.”

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

“What's madness but nobility of soul”

“Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?”

“I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;”

“The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows,”

“one day, when tenderness has become the single rule of the morning,/ I will wake in your arms. perhaps your skin will be overly gorgeous./ and the light will include the impossible understanding of love.”