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Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

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
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Heart
Free
Sing
Verses
Make
Voice
Praise
Fountain
Vineyard
Men
Night
Bottom
Distress
Vineyards
Stills
Follow
Rejoice
Deserts
Still
Poet
Curse
Rapture
Human
Days
Desert
Persuade
Humans
Teach
Healing
Verse
Right
Start
Prison
Farming

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To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
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Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
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The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
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It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
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Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
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Earth, receive an honored guest William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
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Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
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The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.
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I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
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The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they've realised they can't get away with it.
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What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.
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The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
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History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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Harrow the house of the dead look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.
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All I have is a voice.
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Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won't believe again in their own size.
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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.
W. H. Auden