H. Auden
H. Auden
sleep arms faithless
Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm;
poet happens
Poetry makes nothing happen.
mistake gone mets
The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake;
civilization greek conscious
Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.
zero losing loser
In life the loser's score is always zero.
suffering masters
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
helping-others earth helping
We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is beyond me.
time told-you-so
Time will say nothing but I told you so...
leadership imagination quality
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state.
appreciation men imagination
Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.
writing intelligent doe
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
writing chance lifetime
The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
sorry maturity years
My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.
suffering sorrow eating
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; How well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.