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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
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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Forests
Tongues

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In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
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A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
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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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Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
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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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You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
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God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
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I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
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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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No being can make another one happy.
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No hero is mortal till he dies.
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Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
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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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Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
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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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Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
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Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
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