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Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.

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
Years
Alone
Encased
Like
Dies
Amaze
Known
Thunderstorm
Young
Rank
Live
Uniform
Wells
Uniforms
Well
Poet
Every
Talent

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Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
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And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
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Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.
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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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The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
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An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.
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Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.
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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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With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse
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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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Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
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Time will say nothing but I told you so.
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You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
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Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
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The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
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There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow
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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
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