Love Quote by W. H. Auden

To Auden, poetry isn’t a job title or a personality type; it’s an erotic attachment to words themselves. “Before anything else” is doing quiet, muscular work here: it demotes politics, confession, even “meaning” to second place. In the middle of a century that kept trying to draft art into service - propaganda, piety, therapy - Auden insists on a more private allegiance. The poet’s first fidelity is to language: its textures, its tricks, its capacity to turn thought into music and back again.

The phrasing matters. He doesn’t say the poet is “good with words,” a compliment you give someone who writes a decent email. He says “passionately in love,” a commitment that implies vulnerability and obsession, plus the risk of disappointment. Love makes you notice the beloved’s smallest features; it also makes you tolerate their stubbornness. Auden’s subtext is that language is not a neutral tool you wield; it’s a living system that resists you, seduces you, betrays you, forces precision. The poet isn’t merely expressing an inner self but negotiating with the medium that shapes what the self can even think.

Contextually, this is Auden pushing back against the romantic myth of the poet as pure prophet. After modernism, after war, after the ideological heat of the 1930s, he offers a cooler, craft-centered ethic: attention as devotion. The line flatters poetry, but it also disciplines it. If you don’t love the language, you’re just borrowing it to make a point.