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Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.

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
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Playwright
Poet
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University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Good
Technical
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Grateful
Except
Listen
Music
Nothing
Purely

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It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
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Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
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Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offence from luther untill noe that has driven a culture mad. From what occured at linz what huge imago made a psychopathic god. i and the public know what all schoolchildren learn those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
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Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
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The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
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Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
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Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
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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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Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
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Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.
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The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have Not universal love But to be loved alone.
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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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Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them - the one, in fact, which is not a mask.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.
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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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Good can imagine Evil but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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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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