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There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ''Did you get an erection?'' If the answer is ''Yes'' from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.

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
Normal
Erection
Answers
Pornographic
Asks
Pornography
Read
Twelve
Book
Test
Good
Tests
Men
Majority
Answer

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Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts.
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Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral
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Art is born of humiliation.
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You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
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By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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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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Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
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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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Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.
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Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
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The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
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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.
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A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
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Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.
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As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.
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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters How well they understood Its human position how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.
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We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock
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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.
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We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our natural attitude toward the other is one of either indifference or hostility.
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Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead.
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