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If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
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Essayist
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Poet
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Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Look
Certainly
Wells
Youth
Well
Age
Nothing
Away
Looks
Stills
Believe
Still
Anything
Wiser
Able
Wicked

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There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police We must love one another or die.
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It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
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Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
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I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
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One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
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The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
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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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Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
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The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
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Sincerity is technique.
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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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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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There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow
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It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.
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Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
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Art is born of humiliation.
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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.
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Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.
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