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Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.

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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The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.
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Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.
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We were put on this earth to make things.
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Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.
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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
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God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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The stars are not wanted now, put out every one Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun.
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To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.
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Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
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Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
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Art is born of humiliation.
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The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
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The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages, what just reason could he give for refusing?
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It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is, rightly, more important that he eat than that he philosophize.
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Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
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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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Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.
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Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
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I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
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