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One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved. Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

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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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
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It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop.
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the child unlucky in his little State, Some hearth where freedom is excluded, A hive whose honey is fear and worry, Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape
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To ask the hard question is simple.
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All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
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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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All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.
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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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Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
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