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
hate bed get-up
Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.
heart tears may
God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
horse gun wicked
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
thinking firsts study
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.
motorcycle tables artifacts
A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.
worry fancy today
In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or today.
picnics life-is precipice
Life is a picnic on a precipice.
angle
The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
lying littles noses
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
soul hell ifs
If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.
sunny-afternoon shy sunny-day
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
miracle demand facts
We who must die demand a miracle. How could the Eternal do a temporal act, The Infinite become a finite fact? Nothing can save us that is possible: We who must die demand a miracle.
running dog goes-on
Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life
poet said reader
What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.