Quote

To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

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
Giving
Subject
Goya
Would
Subjects
Cezanne
Small
Torso
Away
Clay
Art
Apples
Give
Background
Human
Backgrounds
Humans
Landscape

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By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
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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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Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
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The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.
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The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
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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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The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
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