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W. H. Auden Quotes about Passion

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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

W. H. Auden
Love, Passion, Language Words
"Poets at Work" by W. H. Auden, (p. 170), 1948.

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

W. H. Auden
Stars, Passion, Return
W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”

A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.

W. H. Auden
Silly, Book, Passion

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

W. H. Auden
Grief, Passion, Men

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.

W. H. Auden
Stars, Passion, Dark
W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”

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