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As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
Composer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Language
Political
Defend
Corruption
Poet
Duty

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Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.
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Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
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Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.
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What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
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The closest modern equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot.
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Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams
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The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
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There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.
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We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.
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Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
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The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
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Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
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A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.
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It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
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From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.
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The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake.
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It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
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All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.
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Let all your thinks be thanks.
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