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Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life

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
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University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Course
Dreadful
Running
Spot
Must
Corner
Even
Spots
Life
Dogs
Doggy
Corners
Untidy
Dog
Anyhow
Courses
Martyrdom

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But he would have us most of all remember to be enthusiastic over the night. Not only for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer but also because it needs our love. For with sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow. They are exiles who long for a future that lies in our power.
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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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I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.
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A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.
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Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
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See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.
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We are all here on earth to help others.
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All I have is a voice.
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Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
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There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
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An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
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Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
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Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
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A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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Organic growth is a cyclical process it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.
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As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality without art, no notion of liberty.
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There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.
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The sky is darkening like a stain Something is going to fall like rain And it won't be flowers
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If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
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