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What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.
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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More quotes by W. H. Auden
The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
W. H. Auden
Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
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The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they've realised they can't get away with it.
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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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Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
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By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
W. H. Auden
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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Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
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There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.
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The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
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In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
W. H. Auden
The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.
W. H. Auden
Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one
W. H. Auden
A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.
W. H. Auden
In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or today.
W. H. Auden
All pity is self-pity.
W. H. Auden
The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
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