“What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience—and he decides that the hero “is, in fact, one who is not anxious.” But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself—consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.”

—  Randall Jarrell

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 180
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

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poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965

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“What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience — and he decides that the hero “is, in fact, one who is not anxious.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself — consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 180
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

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