Politics & Power Quote by W. H. Auden

"Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one"

W. H. Auden, Poet

About this Quote

Auden skewers a peculiarly American strain of artistic self-mythology: the lonely genius who believes the fate of the art form depends on his next stanza. The line lands because it’s funny in a dry, exact way. “Every” is the first knife twist - not one or two egomaniacs, but a whole population of poets each privately auditioning for saviorhood. Then Auden turns the pressure up with “whole responsibility,” a phrase that parodies civic duty and wartime rhetoric, as if writing lyric poems were a national emergency.

The punchline is “a literary aristocracy of one.” Aristocracy implies inherited authority, a social class that doesn’t need to be elected because it assumes it deserves to rule. By making it “of one,” Auden exposes the contradiction: aristocracy is collective and institutional; this is pure self-coronation. The subtext isn’t just that poets are vain. It’s that American cultural life, lacking an entrenched literary hierarchy like Europe’s, invites writers to invent their own. When there’s no stable center, everyone becomes their own center.

Context matters: Auden, an English poet who moved to the U.S., watched American poetry professionalize in universities while still clinging to frontier individualism. His jab reads as both affection and alarm. The risk of the “aristocracy of one” is isolation: a scene full of self-appointed monarchs with no shared court, no common standards, and no durable conversation - just a chorus of solitary heirs to a throne that doesn’t exist.

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Topic	Poetry
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W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden (February 21, 1907 - September 29, 1973) was a Poet from England.

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