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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.

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
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Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Forests
Tongues
Illness
Wolves
Tongue
Peasants
Kept
Mourning
Rivers
Fashionable
Poet
Ran
Evergreen
Death
Poems
Evergreens
River
Peasant

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Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.
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No hero is mortal till he dies.
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To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.
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How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
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We were put on this earth to make things.
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Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.
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Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
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Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
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America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
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God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
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One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.
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