Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden doesn’t flatter scientists so much as he flays himself with class-conscious precision. The image is comic and slightly mortifying: a “shabby curate” (earnest, underpaid, fraying at the cuffs) accidentally entering a salon of “dukes” (hereditary authority, effortless entitlement). It’s a joke with teeth because it borrows the old British hierarchy to describe a newer one: the 20th-century prestige shift toward scientific expertise. In Auden’s mouth, science isn’t merely another profession; it’s an aristocracy of demonstrated competence, complete with its own gatekeeping manners and intimidating fluency.

The intent is double. On the surface, it’s a confession of inferiority, the poet as underqualified cleric among the real rulers of modern life. Underneath, Auden is sketching the crisis of the humanities after two world wars, when “truth” began to look less like moral vision and more like measurable fact. Calling himself a curate also carries a sly admission: poets once functioned as unofficial priests, tasked with meaning-making and moral weather reports. In the scientist’s company, that vocation feels quaint, even slightly fraudulent.

Yet Auden’s metaphor also pricks the scientists. Dukes are not chosen for wisdom; they inherit position. By casting science as nobility, he hints at a new deference that can become automatic, unexamined. The line lands because it’s both self-deprecating and quietly suspicious: admiration with a raised eyebrow, reverence haunted by the fear that modern culture has mistaken authority for omniscience.