Quote #58

To some degree every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

More from Wystan Hugh Auden

  1. In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement, it was also easier to tell a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some m…
  2. A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or wo…
  3. All pity is self-pity.
  4. Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human d…
  5. All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: 'I refuse to be what I am.'
  6. When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
  7. The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only par…
  8. No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

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