Three excerpts from Auden's "The Cave of Making." The first two relate to poetry, though in some ways the second verse would be sound advice for all artists.
After all, it's rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background-noise for study
or hung as status-trophy by rising executives,
cannot be "done" like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored.
God may reduce you
on Judgement Day
to tears of shame,
reciting by heart
the poems you would
have written, had
your life been good.
The final one captures something about life in the wake of 20th century totalitarianism, that still seems to ring true today ...
More than ever
life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, loveable,
but we shan't, not since Stalin
and Hitler,
trust ourselves ever again: we
know that, subjectively,
all is possible.
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