W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Audenwas an English poet, who later became an American citizen. He is best known for love poems such as "Funeral Blues," poems on political and social themes such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles," poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae." He was born in York, grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 February 1907
two greek would-be
In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
cooking meteorology would-be
Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
death philosophical picnics
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
hell
Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
mean government choices
Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.
love-life men lap
An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
taken hands plot
From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.
fire immortal composing
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
photography art skills
It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject.
laughter justice sorrow
The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.
language metaphorical humans
Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
love relationship running
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
our-world body claims
Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
thinking personal-knowledge guessing
The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.