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I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.
W. H. Auden
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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going to smash They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods. A culture is no better than its woods.
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We are all here on earth to help others what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
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Does God judge us by appearances? I Suspect that He does.
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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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In life the loser's score is always zero.
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Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!
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Hunger allows no choice.
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The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
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Water is the soul of the Earth.
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A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.
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Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
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The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
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The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.
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Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
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A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
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The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists
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To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
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In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start.
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Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.
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