Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 – 1973)
Anglo-American poet noted for his vast poetic work in many forms on many themes.
The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged.
When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
Put the car away; when life fails
What's the good of going to Wales?
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
Thoughts of his own death,
like the distant roll
of thunder at a picnic.
In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
Let us then
Consider rather the incessant Now of
The traveler through time, his tired mind
Biased towards bigness since his body must
Exaggerate to exist, possessed by hope...
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish.
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
I am beginning to lose patience
With my personal relations.
They are not deep
And they are not cheap.
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to their graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.