If you are in Vienna this forthcoming Tuesday, join us at #ViennaCityLibrary #Wienbibliothek for some (German-language) glimpse into the editors' workshop:

🌐 https://www.wienbibliothek.at/veranstaltungen-ausstellungen/veranstaltungen/forschungswerkstatt-w-h-auden-oesterreich

@ACDHCH_OeAW @oeaw @fwf

#AustrianAuden #DigitalEdition #DigitalHumanities #DSE #SDE #WHAuden #Auden

A quotation from W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden (1907-1973) Anglo-American poet [Wystan Hugh Auden]
“Shorts,” No. 7 (c. 1930), Collected Poems, Part 2 “1927-1932” (1976 ed.) [ed. Mendelson]

More about this quote: wist.info/auden-w-h/26031/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #whauden #auden #action #danger #deed #hesitation #hesitancy #inaction #indecision #irrationality #paralysis #passive #reason #reflex #thoughtlessness #unreason #whimsy

Came across this, from a poem by W. H. Auden (from a book @ZaneSelvans recommended that I just got out of the library)

I love this so much:

From Letter to Elizabeth Mayer: (January 1, 1940) [published in The Atlantic 1941]

How hard it is to set aside
Terror, concupiscence and pride,
Learn who and where and how we are,
The children of a modest star,
Frail, backward, clinging to the granite
Skirts of a sensible old planet,
Our placid and suburban nurse
In Sitter’s swelling universe,
How hard to stretch imagination
To live according to our station.

W. H. Auden

#poetry #whauden

#RefugeeBlues #WHAuden #déjà_vu #poetry

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist.... This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.
-- W. H. Auden

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #WHAuden #HumanBeings #Physicians

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunset #Florida

WH Auden formed 'intense friendship' with sex worker who burgled him

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/27/wh-auden-long-lost-letters-to-man-who-burgled-him

#HackerNews #WHAuden #Friendship #SexWorker #Burgled #Letters #Literature

Delighted to make available & study the previously unknown (& unexpected) correspondence by poet #WHAuden to his Austrian lover & confidant, shedding new light on #Auden's life in #Austria & on Austrian #queerhistory. 🔍

🌐 https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/sensational-discovery-unknown-letters-by-poet-w-h-auden-found-in-lower-austria-1
🌐 https://youtu.be/Ebidu0iWfxk?si=2vi_Ee2IDamKJ1a6

@fwf @ACDHCH_OeAW @oeaw

#AustrianAuden