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Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead.

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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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Lying
Conspicuous
Lawn
Overhead
Lawns
Vegas
Bed

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The poet who writes free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
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So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.
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In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or today.
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The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
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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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To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith
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No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
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A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting he must also believe it to be true.
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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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A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
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Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
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Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.
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We were put on this earth to make things.
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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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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.
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There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
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Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
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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.
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