Auden on Writing, Money, and the Difference Between Authenticity and Originality
“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”
“The interests of a writer and the interests of his* readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident.” – W. H. Auden
W.H. Auden (1907–1973), was a poet and writer famous for his wide-ranging and witty engagement with topics from religion and morality to love and politics. He was born in York and grew up in Birmingham, England.
Auden’s sensibility as a writer was deeply shaped by the political strife emerging in Europe in the 1930s. As one scholar of Auden writes,
“A significant proportion of Auden’s writing of the 1930s had seemed to engage with what he so memorably termed ‘the dangerous flood/ Of history’…understood to be the unignorable claim of ‘our time’, with its imbalanced tyrannies, injustices and inequalities, on the responsive individual.”
While Auden was one of the most prolific and influential writers of the past…
