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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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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Forbid
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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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God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
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August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.
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We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.
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Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
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A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothingto increase it what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?
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Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
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Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
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Sincerity is technique.
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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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From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.
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Long ago the accusations had begun, And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged
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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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Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
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Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
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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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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
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There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.
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Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?
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We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
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