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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
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Every
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Dies
Amaze
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Young
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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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Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.
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Criticism should be a casual conversation.
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Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.
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Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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We must love one another or die
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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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I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.
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We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock
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How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
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Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.
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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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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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Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.
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When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
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A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.
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A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going to smash They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods. A culture is no better than its woods.
W. H. Auden