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Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

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
Mythological
Metaphorical
Language
Nature
Human
Humans

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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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Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
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Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
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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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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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You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.
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The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
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We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.
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Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think
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Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss
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But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer writer for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer poetry would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
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What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
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I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
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It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, What should I write at the age of sixty-four, but never, What should I write in 1940.
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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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Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral
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All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
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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.
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Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
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