Art & Creativity Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden draws a clean, slightly sly line between the arts not to rank them, but to expose their different forms of power. Calling poetry "reflective" is more than a compliment to its intelligence; it’s an admission of friction. Poetry interrupts experience. It makes a reader pause, re-read, test the weight of a word against the world. The stop is the point: poetry builds meaning through delay, through the mind’s second thoughts.

Then comes the pivot: "Music is immediate". Auden, a poet with an almost musical ear, isn’t dismissing music as mindless sensation. He’s naming its ambush. Music doesn’t ask permission. It arrives as mood before it becomes message, bodily before it becomes interpretable. Where poetry foregrounds consciousness, music can bypass it, and that bypass is a kind of authority. You don’t argue with a chord change; you feel it, and only later invent reasons.

The unfinished tail - "it goes on to become" - is doing crucial work. Auden leaves the sentence open because music’s meaning is not fixed at the moment of hearing; it blooms in time, in repetition, in memory. Poetry "stops to think"; music keeps moving, and by continuing it gathers associations, turning into consolation, agitation, solidarity, or propaganda depending on who is listening and why.

In Auden’s century - radio, mass politics, war - immediacy isn’t innocent. He’s hinting that the art that doesn’t pause can unite crowds or sweep them away. Poetry’s hesitation is its ethics; music’s momentum is its risk and its seduction.