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Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.

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
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Character
Precisely
Persons
Clever
Person
Communicate
Sing
Singing
Stupid
Song
Credible
Place
Beautifully

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Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.
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Learn from your dreams what you lack.
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The poet who writes free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
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Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
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A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.
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A shilling life will give you all the facts.
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Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
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To ask the hard question is simple.
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Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ''shaggy dog'' stories they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.
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A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
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Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams
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Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
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I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade
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One can only blaspheme if one believes.
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I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone says: 'Whom do you write for?' I reply: 'Do you read me?' If they say 'Yes,' I say, 'Do you like it?' If they say 'No,' then I say, 'I don't write for you.'
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Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
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A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.
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