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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
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Language
More quotes by W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade
W. H. Auden
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
A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
W. H. Auden
To make one, there must be two.
W. H. Auden
There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.
W. H. Auden
Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
W. H. Auden
Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ''shaggy dog'' stories they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.
W. H. Auden
You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
W. H. Auden
And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
W. H. Auden
The stars are dead. The animals will not look: We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
W. H. Auden
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
W. H. Auden
With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse
W. H. Auden
Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!
W. H. Auden
Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
W. H. Auden
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
W. H. Auden
The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. Auden
Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
W. H. Auden
