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To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.

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
Joy
Seemed
Turn
English
Adolescent
Turns
Grateful
Eternally
Often
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Sensibility
Gave
Perfectly
Poet
Male
Youth
Males
Generations
Express

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Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
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Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
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Long ago the accusations had begun, And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged
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One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.
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One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
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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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Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
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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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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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We are all here on earth to help others.
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And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
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You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
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If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
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Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
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All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.
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There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow
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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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You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
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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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