Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden skewers the writer’s ego with the kind of dry, surgical humor that lands because it’s half-confession, half-indictment. The opening distinction is the tell: no serious artist wants to erase the tradition. Canon is oxygen. Poets and novelists live on ancestors, stealing meters, plots, metaphors, even permission. But wanting to be “the only one alive” is a more plausible vanity: not to abolish history, just to silence the competition, to make the present a private stage.

The line works because it treats envy as a professional hazard dressed up as vocation. “Fondly believe” is the twist of the knife. Auden isn’t only describing the craving to be singular; he’s mocking the self-serving delusion that one already is. It’s a portrait of the authorial mind at its most flattering to itself: the quiet certainty that everyone else is minor, derivative, or simply not really in the room.

Context matters: Auden wrote from inside a century that professionalized literary culture while also expanding it - prizes, reviews, reputations, small magazines, universities. The modern writer is both priest and applicant, competing for attention in a crowded marketplace while pretending to answer to higher laws. Auden’s jab exposes the contradiction: the rhetoric of humility (“part of a tradition”) coexists with a hunger for monopoly (“let the world have only my voice today”).

It also doubles as a warning. When a writer starts believing the wish has been granted, you get not greatness but solipsism: work that stops listening, stops learning, stops being surprised by other minds.