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Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
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Essayist
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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University Teacher
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Mixed
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Poetry
Expression
Clear
Feelings
Might

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It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
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You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.
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Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.
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The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
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August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.
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Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
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A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
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If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.
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Time will say nothing but I told you so.
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Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
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To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.
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To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
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Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?
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A shilling life will give you all the facts.
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When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
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If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.
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Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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Alone, alone, about the dreadful wood / Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, / Dreading to find its Father.
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To be free is often to be lonely.
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Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
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