Public speakers over here seem to do a lot of quoting these days. I suppose they always have, but it seems so much more predictable, more banal, in this age of iron. And there's that curious phenomenon when they give the name of the chap they're quoting from, as if you really should know who he is, and he turns out to be a complete non-entity.
Yet chaps who are really worth quoting rarely get a look-in. I can't think of the last time I heard old Wystan Hugh quoted in public, except for me doing it the other day in a lecture on Yeats. And a very apposite moment it was. But one glance at The Dyer's Hand is enough to render a whole range of pithy apercus appropriate for just about any occasion when you need to stir folks up a bit. This one on poets pretty much nails the whole bunch, I reckon: All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
Oh, and Auden kicks off the whole collection of his essays with this killer from old Freddie Nietzsche: We have Art in order that we may not perish from Truth. A reminder that everyone's favourite philosophical loony got it awfully right a lot of the time.
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