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Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.

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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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Poet
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Rules
Blessed
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Free
Forbid
Force
Automatic
Self
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All I have is a voice.
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Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.
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Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
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Now is the age of anxiety.
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Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.
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All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
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In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
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To make one, there must be two.
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Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.
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History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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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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Look if you like, but you will have to leap.
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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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Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
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To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
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The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
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Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
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The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.
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