Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden slices perception into two flawed appetites, and the point isn’t physiology so much as artistic strategy. The ear “lazy” and “shocked by the unexpected” is a brutal little admission about how sound works on us: rhythm, rhyme, and tonal patterns sneak past our critical defenses precisely because they’re repeatable. We like returning to a beat; we distrust what breaks it. In poetry, that’s not a bug, it’s a lever. The poet can lull listeners into trust with the familiar, then land a surprise that actually registers because it violates an established expectation.

The eye, “impatient” and hungry for novelty, flips the problem. Visual attention scans; it wants the next stimulus, the next image, the next cut. Repetition becomes wallpaper. Auden is quietly diagnosing why modernity pushes writers toward cinematic techniques: sharp images, quick turns, a kind of montage. If the ear can be seduced by pattern, the eye must be kept from wandering.

The subtext is a warning against one-size-fits-all aesthetic rules. What feels like “clarity” or “originality” depends on which sense your medium recruits. It also reads as a critique of artistic laziness: defaulting to what pleases the ear (sing-song musicality) can become a narcotic, while chasing what pleases the eye (constant novelty) can become empty stimulus.

Contextually, Auden is a poet thinking across media in a century when radio, film, and advertising rewired attention. He’s mapping not just sensory habits but cultural ones: tradition as comfort, modernism as shock, and the artist’s job as a careful rationing of both.