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Looking Up At The Stars, I Know Quite Well That, For All They Care, I Can Go To Hell, But On Earth Indifference Is The Least We Have To Dread From Man Or Beast. How Should We Like It Were Stars To Burn With A Passion For Us We Could Not Return? If Equal Affection Cannot Be, Let The More Loving One Be Me. Admirer As I Think I Am Of Stars That Do Not Give A Damn, I Cannot, Now I See Them, Say I Missed One Terribly All Day. Were All Stars To Disappear Or Die, I Should Learn To Look At An Empty Sky And Feel Its Total Dark Sublime, Though This Might Take Me A Little Time.

-W. H. Auden

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Looking Up At The

W. H. Auden

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Looking Up At The Stars, I Know Quite Well That, For All They Care, I Can Go To Hell, But On Earth Indifference Is The Least We Have To Dread From Man Or Beast. How Should We Like It Were Stars To Burn With A Passion For Us We Could Not Return? If Equal Affection Cannot Be, Let The More Loving One Be Me. Admirer As I Think I Am Of Stars That Do Not Give A Damn, I Cannot, Now I See Them, Say I Missed One Terribly All Day. Were All Stars To Disappear Or Die, I Should Learn To Look At An Empty Sky And Feel Its Total Dark Sublime, Though This Might Take Me A Little Time.

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Every American Poet Feels That The Whole Responsibility For Contemporary Poetry Has Fallen Upon His Shoulders, That He Is A Literary Aristocracy Of One.

With The Farming Of A Verse Make A Vineyard Of The Curse

In Headaches And In Worry Vaguely Life Leaks Away, And Time Will Have His Fancy To-morrow Or Today.

He Was My North, My South, My East And West, My Working Week And My Sunday Rest, My Noon, My Midnight, My Talk, My Song; I Thought That Love Would Last Forever: I Was Wrong.

Sincerity Is Technique.

The Belief That Politics Can Be Scientific Must Inevitably Produce Tyrannies. Politics Cannot Be A Science, Because In Politics Theory And Practice Cannot Be Separated, And The Sciences Depend Upon Their Separation. Empirical Politics Must Be Kept In Bounds By Democratic Institutions, Which Leave It Up To The Subjects Of The Experiment To Say Whether It Shall Be Tried, And To Stop It If They Dislike It, Because, In Politics, There Is A Distinction, Unknown To Science, Between Truth And Justice.

Music Is The Best Means We Have Of Digesting Time.

Between Friends Differences In Taste Or Opinion Are Irritating In Direct Proportion To Their Triviality.

Funny Friendship

Funny Best Friend

Aside From Purely Technical Analysis, Nothing Can Be Said About Music, Except When It Is Bad; When It Is Good, One Can Only Listen And Be Grateful.

A Real Book Is Not One That We Read, But One That Reads Us.

Between Labor And Play Stands Work. A Man Is A Worker If He Is Personally Interested In The Job Which Society Pays Him To Do; Whatfrom The Point Of View Of Society Is Necessary Labor Is From His Point Of View Voluntary Play. Whether A Job Is To Be Classified As Labor Or Work Depends, Not On The Job Itself, But On The Tastes Of The Individual Who Undertakes It. The Difference Does Not, For Example, Coincide With The Difference Between A Manual And A Mental Job; A Gardener Or A Cobbler May Be A Worker, A Bank Clerk A Laborer.

The Ideal Audience The Poet Imagines Consists Of The Beautiful Who Go To Bed With Him, The Powerful Who Invite Him To Dinner And Tell Him Secrets Of State, And His Fellow-poets. The Actual Audience He Gets Consists Of Myopic Schoolteachers, Pimply Young Men Who Eat In Cafeterias, And His Fellow-poets. This Means, In Fact, He Writes For His Fellow-poets.

Let Me See What I Wrote So I Know What I Think

Language Is The Mother, Not The Handmaiden, Of Thought; Words Will Tell You Things You Never Thought Or Felt Before.

Those Who Hate To Go To Bed Fear Death; Those Who Hate To Get Up Fear Life.

I Smell Blood And An Era Of Prominent Madmen.

What Answer To The Meaning Of Existence Should One Require Beyond The Right To Exercise One's Gifts?

The Americans Are Violently Oral. That's Why In America The Mother Is All-important And The Father Has No Position At All -- Isn't Respected In The Least. Even The American Passion For Laxatives Can Be Explained As An Oral Manifestation. They Want To Get Rid Of Any Unpleasantness Taken In Through The Mouth.

Doom Is Dark And Deeper Than Any Sea-dingle.

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.

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.

Those Who Will Not Reason, Perish In The Act. Those Who Will Not Act, Perish For That Reason.

Swans In The Winter Air A White Perfection Have

Laziness Acknowledges The Relation Of The Present To The Past But Ignores Its Relation To The Future; Impatience Acknowledge Its Relation To The Future But Ignores Its Relation To The Past; Neither The Lazy Nor The Impatient Man, That Is, Accepts The Present Instant In Its Full Reality And So Cannot Love His Neighbour Completely.

There's Only One Good Test Of Pornography. Get Twelve Normal Men To Read The Book, And Then Ask Them, ''did You Get An Erection?'' If The Answer Is ''yes'' From A Majority Of The Twelve, Then The Book Is Pornographic.

When One Looks Into The Window Of A Store Which Sells Devotional Art Objects, One Can't Help Wishing The Iconoclasts Had Won.

My Face Looks Like A Wedding-cake Left Out In The Rain.

All Works Of Art Are Commissioned In The Sense That No Artist Can Create One By A Simple Act Of Will But Must Wait Until What He Believes To Be A Good Idea For A Work Comes To Him.

We Honor Founders Of These Starving Cities, Whose Honor Is The Image Of Our Sorrow.

O Let Not Time Deceive You, You Cannot Conquer Time.

Christ Did Not Enchant Men; He Demanded That They Believe In Him: Except On One Occasion, The Transfiguration. For A Brief While, Peter, James, And John Were Permitted To See Him In His Glory. For That Brief While They Had No Need Of Faith. The Vision Vanished, And The Memory Of It Did Not Prevent Them From All Forsaking Him When He Was Arrested, Or Peter From Denying That He Had Ever Known Him.

It's Impossible To Represent A Saint [in Art]. It Becomes Boring. Perhaps Because He Is, Like The Saturday Evening Post People, Inthe Position Of Having Almost Infinitely Free Will.

If Equal Affection Cannot Be, Let The More Loving Be Me.

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

I'll Love You Till The Ocean Is Folded And Hung Up To Dry And The Seven Stars Go Squawking Like Geese About The Sky.

The Nightingales Are Sobbing In The Orchards Of Our Mothers, And Hearts That We Broke Long Ago Have Long Been Breaking Others; Tears Are Round, The Sea Is Deep: Roll Them Overboard And Sleep.

Our Claim To Our Own Bodies And Our World Is Our Catastrophe.

And None Will Hear The Postman’s Knock Without A Quickening Of The Heart. For Who Can Bear To Feel Himself Forgotten?

Dance, Dance, Dance Till You Drop.

The Basic Stimulus To The Intelligence Is Doubt, A Feeling That The Meaning Of An Experience Is Not Self-evident.

Thou Shalt Not Answer Questionnaires Or Quizzes Upon World Affairs, Nor With Compliance Take Any Test. Thou Shalt Not Sit With Statisticians Nor Commit A Social Science.

Literary Confessors Are Contemptible, Like Beggars Who Exhibit Their Sores For Money, But Not So Contemptible As The Public That Buys Their Books.

We Till Shadowed Days Are Done, We Must Weep And Sing Duty's Conscious Wrong, The Devil In The Clock

The Lights Must Never Go Out, The Music Must Always Play

A Poet Is, Before Anything Else, A Person Who Is Passionately In Love With Language.

Money Is The Necessity That Frees Us From Necessity.

Of All Possible Subjects, Travel Is The Most Difficult For An Artist, As It Is The Easiest For A Journalist.

There Was Still Gold And Silver In The Mountains, And Hunger Was A More Immediate Sorrow

Every High C Accurately Struck Demolishes The Theory That We Are The Irresponsible Puppets Of Fate Or Chance.

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.

It Has Been Said That A Poem Should Not Mean But Be. This Is Not Quite Accurate. In A Poem, As Distinct From Many Other Kinds Of Verbal Societies, Meaning And Being Are Identical. A Poem Might Be Called A Pseudo-person. Like A Person, It Is Unique And Addresses The Reader Personally. On The Other Hand, Like A Natural Being And Unlike A Historical Person, It Cannot Lie.

All The Literati Keep An Imaginary Friend.

Imaginary Friend

In A Land Which Is Fully Settled, Most Men Must Accept Their Local Environment Or Try To Change It By Political Means; Only The Exceptionally Gifted Or Adventurous Can Leave To Seek His Fortune Elsewhere. In America, On The Other Hand, To Move On And Make A Fresh Start Somewhere Else Is Still The Normal Reaction To Dissatisfaction And Failure.

To Be Happy Means To Be Free, Not From Pain Or Fear, But From Care Or Anxiety.

To Save Your World You Asked This Man To Die; Would This Man, Could He See You Now, Ask Why?

What The Poet Says Has Never Been Said Before, But, Once He Has Said It, His Readers Recognize Its Validity For Themselves.

Like Everything Which Is Not The Involuntary Result Of Fleeting Emotion But The Creation Of Time And Will, Any Marriage, Happy Or Unhappy, Is Infinitely More Interesting Than Any Romance, However Passionate.

Young People, Who Are Still Uncertain Of Their Identity, Often Try On A Succession Of Masks In The Hope Of Finding The One Which Suits Them - The One, In Fact, Which Is Not A Mask.

Finding The One

The Relation Of Faith Between Subject And Object Is Unique In Every Case. Hundreds May Believe, But Each Has To Believe By Himself.

To Read Is To Translate, For No Two Persons' Experiences Are The Same. A Bad Reader Is Like A Bad Translator: He Interprets Literally When He Ought To Paraphrase And Paraphrases When He Ought To Interpret Literally.

Drama Is Based On The Mistake. I Think Someone Is My Friend When He Really Is My Enemy, That I Am Free To Marry A Woman When In Fact She Is My Mother, That This Person Is A Chambermaid When It Is A Young Nobleman In Disguise, That This Well-dressed Young Man Is Rich When He Is Really A Penniless Adventurer, Or That If I Do This Such And Such A Result Will Follow When In Fact It Results In Something Very Different. All Good Drama Has Two Movements, First The Making Of The Mistake, Then The Discovery That It Was A Mistake.

But If A Stranger In The Train Asks Me My Occupation, I Never Answer "writer" For Fear That He May Go On To Ask Me What I Write, And To Answer "poetry" Would Embarrass Us Both, For We Both Know That Nobody Can Earn A Living Simply By Writing Poetry.

Composing Mortals With Immortal Fire.

Had Greek Civilization Never Existed ... We Would Never Have Become Fully Conscious.

The Words Of A Dead Man Are Modified In The Guts Of The Living.

Into This Neutral Air Where Blind Skyscrapers Use Their Full Height To Proclaim The Strength Of Collective Man, Each Language Pours Its Vain Competitive Excuse.

Thank God For Books As An Alternative To Conversation.

It Is, For Example, Axiomatic That We Should All Think Of Ourselves As Being More Sensitive Than Other People Because, When We Are Insensitive In Our Dealings With Others, We Cannot Be Aware Of It At The Time: Conscious Insensitivity Is A Self-contradiction.

Now Is The Age Of Anxiety.

A False Enchantment Can All Too Easily Last A Lifetime.

Cats Can Be Very Funny, And Have The Oddest Ways Of Showing They're Glad To See You.

I Said Earlier That I Do Not Believe An Artist's Life Throws Much Light Upon His Works. I Do Believe, However, That, More Often Than Most People Realize, His Works May Throw Light Upon His Life. An Artist With Certain Imaginative Ideas In His Head May Then Involve Himself In Relationships Which Are Congenial To Them.

It's Better To Say, 'i'm Suffering,' Than To Say, 'this Landscape Is Ugly.

Lost In A Haunted Wood, Children Afraid Of The Night Who Have Never Been Happy Or Good.

In The Eyes Of Others A Man Is A Poet If He Has Written One Good Poem. In His Own He Is Only A Poet At The Moment When He Is Making His Last Revision To A New Poem. The Moment Before, He Was Still Only A Potential Poet; The Moment After, He Is A Man Who Has Ceased To Write Poetry, Perhaps Forever.

A Dead Man Who Never Caused Others To Die Seldom Rates A Statue.

Out On The Lawn I Lie In Bed, Vega Conspicuous Overhead.

The Center That I Cannot Find Is Known To My Unconscious Mind.

My Deepest Feeling About Politicians Is That They Are Dangerous Lunatics To Be Avoided When Possible And Carefully Humored; People, Above All, To Whom One Must Never Tell The Truth.

The Class Distinctions Proper To A Democratic Society Are Not Those Of Rank Or Money, Still Less, As Is Apt To Happen When These Are Abandoned, Of Race, But Of Age.

Acts Of Injustice Done Between The Setting And The Rising Sun In History Lie Like Bones, Each One.

An Honest Self-portrait Is Extremely Rare Because A Man Who Has Reached The Degree Of Self-consciousness Presupposed By The Desire To Paint His Own Portrait Has Almost Always Also Developed An Ego-consciousness Which Paints Himself Painting Himself, And Introduces Artificial Highlights And Dramatic Shadows.

Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love, Human On My Faithless Arm.

August For The People And Their Favourite Islands. Daily The Steamers Sidle Up To Meet The Effusive Welcome Of The Pier.

How Happy Is The Lot Of The Mathematician! He Is Judged Solely By His Peers, And The Standard Is So High That No Colleague Or Rival Can Ever Win A Reputation He Does Not Deserve. No Cashier Writes A Letter To The Press Complaining About The Incomprehensibility Of Modern Mathematics And Comparing It Unfavorably With The Good Old Days When Mathematicians Were Content To Paper Irregularly Shaped Rooms And Fill Bathtubs Without Closing The Waste Pipe.

To Ask The Hard Question Is Simple.

In Times Of Joy, All Of Us Wished We Possessed A Tail We Could Wag.

We Were Put On This Earth To Make Things.

Long Ago The Accusations Had Begun, And Suddenly Knew By Whom It Had Been Judged

Be Subtle, Various, Ornamental, Clever, And Do Not Listen To Those Critics Ever Whose Crude Provincial Gullets Crave In Books Plain Cooking Made Still Plainer By Plain Cooks.

I'll Love You, Dear, I'll Love You Till China And Africa Meet And The River Jumps Over The Mountain And The Salmon Sing In The Street.

To Discover How To Be Human Now Is The Reason We Follow This Star.

But Once In A While The Odd Thing Happens Once In A While The Dream Comes True And The Whole Pattern Of Life Is Altered Once In A While, The Moon Turns Blue

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.

It Takes Little Talent To See What Lies Under One's Nose, A Good Deal To Know In What Direction To Point That Organ.

The Most Exciting Rhythms Seem Unexpected And Complex, The Most Beautiful Melodies Simple And Inevitable.

Dance Till The Stars Come Down From The Rafters Dance, Dance, Dance 'till You Drop.

Let All Your Thinks Be Thanks.

As Biological Organisms Made Of Matter, We Are Subject To The Laws Of Physics And Biology: As Conscious Persons Who Create Our Own History We Are Free To Decide What That History Shall Be. Without Science, We Should Have No Notion Of Equality; Without Art, No Notion Of Liberty.

How Happy The Lot Of The Mathematician. He Is Judged Solely By His Peers, And The Standard Is So High That No Colleague Or Rival Can Ever Win A Reputation He Does Not Deserve.

Defenceless Under The Night Our World In Stupor Lies; Yet, Dotted Everywhere, Ironic Points Of Light Flash Out Wherever The Just Exchange Their Messages: May I, Composed Like Them Of Eros And Of Dust, Beleaguered By The Same Negation And Despair, Show An Affirming Flame.

Harrow The House Of The Dead; Look Shining At New Styles Of Architecture, A Change Of Heart.

Intellectual Disgrace Stares From Every Human Face, And The Seas Of Pity Lie Locked And Frozen In Each Eye.

A Vice In Common Can Be The Ground Of A Friendship But Not A Virtue In Common. X And Y May Be Friends Because They Are Both Drunkards Or Womanizers But, If They Are Both Sober And Chaste, They Are Friends For Some Other Reason.

One Of The Most Horrible, Yet Most Important, Discoveries Of Our Age Has Been That, If You Really Wish To Destroy A Person And Turn Him Into An Automaton, The Surest Method Is Not Physical Torture, In The Strict Sense, But Simply To Keep Him Awake, I.e., In An Existential Relation To Life Without Intermission.

A Poet Feels The Impulse To Create A Work Of Art When The Passive Awe Provoked By An Event Is Transformed Into A Desire To Express That Awe In A Rite Of Worship.

Health Is The State About Which Medicine Has Nothing To Say.

The Slogan Of Hell: Eat Or Be Eaten. The Slogan Of Heaven: Eat And Be Eaten.

Fame Often Makes A Writer Vain, But Seldom Makes Him Proud.

The Three Wiseman: The Weather Has Been Awful, The Countryside Is Dreary, Marsh, Jungle, Rock; And Echoes Mock, Calling Our Hope Unlawful; But A Silly Song Can Help Along Yours Ever And Sincerely: At Least We Know For Certain That We Are Three Old Sinners, That This Journey Is Much Too Long, That We Want Our Dinners, And Miss Our Wives, Our Books, Our Dogs, But Have Only The Vaguest Idea Why We Are What We Are. To Discover How To Be Human Now Is The Reason We Follow This Star.

In Life The Loser's Score Is Always Zero.

If We Apply The Term Revolution To What Happened In North America Between 1776 And 1829, It Has A Special Meaning. Normally, The Word Describes The Process By Which Man Transforms Himself From One Kind Of Man, Living In One Kind Of Society, With One Way Of Looking At The World, Into Another Kind Of Man, Another Society, Another Conception Of Life.... The American Case Is Different: It Is Not A Question Of The Old Man Transforming Himself Into The New, But Of The New Man Becoming Alive To The Fact That He Is New, That He Has Been Transformed Already Without His Having Realized It.

Without Art, We Should Have No Notion Of The Sacred; Without Science, We Should Always Worship False Gods.

A God Who Is Both Self-sufficient And Content To Remain So Could Not Interest Us Enough To Raise The Question Of His Existence.

One Can Only Blaspheme If One Believes.

An Unmanly Sort Of Man Whose Love Life Seems To Have Been Largely Confined To Crying In Laps And Playing Mouse.

What Living Occasion Can, Be Just To The Absent?

Great Art Is Clear Thinking About Mixed Feelings.

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.

Men Will Pay Large Sums To Whores For Telling Them They Are Not Bores.

Shall Memory Restore The Steps And The Shore, The Face And The Meeting Place.

All Poets Adore Explosions, Thunderstorms, Tornadoes, Conflagrations, Ruins, Scenes Of Spectacular Carnage. The Poetic Imagination Is Not At All A Desirable Quality In A Statesman.

As I Walked Out One Evening, Walking Down Bristol Street, The Crowds Upon The Pavement Were Fields Of Harvest Wheat. And Down By The Brimming River I Heard A Lover Sing Under An Arch Of The Railway: 'love Has No Ending. 'i'll Love You, Dear, I'll Love You Till China And Africa Meet, And The River Jumps Over The Mountain And The Salmon Sing In The Street, 'i'll Love You Till The Ocean Is Folded And Hung Up To Dry And The Seven Stars Go Squawking Like Geese About The Sky.

Mad Ireland Hurt You Into Poetry.

In The End, Art Is Small Beer. The Really Serious Things Are Earning One's Living So As Not To Be A Parasite And Loving One's Neighbor.

God Bless The Usa, So Large, So Friendly, And So Rich.

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.

Poetry Might Be Defined As The Clear Expression Of Mixed Feelings.

There Is A Great Deal Of Difference In Believing Something Still, And Believing It Again.

The Older Lives Like Not To Be Stood In Rows Or At Right Angles.

In Order That People May Be Happy In Their Work, These Three Things Are Needed: They Must Be Fit For It: They Must Not Do Too Much Of It: And They Must Have A Sense Of Success In It - Not A Doubtful Sense, Such As Needs Some Testimony Of Others For Its Confirmation, But A Sure Sense, Or Rather Knowledge, That So Much Work Has Been Done Well, And Fruitfully Done, Whatever The World May Say Or Think About It.

Clear, Unscaleable Ahead, Rise The Mountains Of Instead From Whose Cold, Cascading Streams None May Drink Except In Dreams

Lovers Have Lived So Long With Giants And Elves, They Won't Believe Again In Their Own Size.

If Age, Which Is Certainly Just As Wicked As Youth, Look Any Wiser, It Is Only That Youth Is Still Able To Believe It Will Get Away With Anything, While Age Knows Only Too Well That It Has Got Away With Nothing.

Private Faces In Public Places Are Wiser And Nicer Than Public Faces In Private Places.

If There Are Any Souls In Hell, It Is Because That Is Where They Insist On Being.

The Poet Who Writes "free" Verse Is Like Robinson Crusoe On His Desert Island: He Must Do All His Cooking, Laundry And Darning For Himself. In A Few Exceptional Cases, This Manly Independence Produces Something Original And Impressive, But More Often The Result Is Squalor - Dirty Sheets On The Unmade Bed And Empty Bottles On The Unswept Floor.

Adjectives Are The Potbelly Of Poetry.

To The Man-in-the-street, Who, I'm Sorry To Say, Is A Keen Observer Of Life. The Word Intellectual Suggests Straight Away. A Man Who's Untrue To His Wife.

One Cannot Walk Through An Assembly Factory And Not Feel That One Is In Hell.

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.

As A Poet, There Is Only One Political Duty, And That Is To Defend One's Language From Corruption.

A Poor American Feels Guilty At Being Poor, But Less Guilty Than An American Rentier Who Has Inherited Wealth But Is Doing Nothingto Increase It; What Can The Latter Do But Take To Drink And Psychoanalysis?

Proper Names Are Poetry In The Raw. Like All Poetry They Are Untranslatable.

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.

Civilizations Should Be Measured By The Degree Of Diversity Attained And The Degree Of Unity Retained.

The Glacier Knocks In The Cupboard, The Desert Sighs In The Bed, And The Crack In The Teacup Opens A Lane To The Land Of The Dead.

Money Cannot Buy The Fuel Of Love But Is Excellent Kindling.

God Is Love, We Are Taught As Children To Believe. But When We First Begin To Get Some Inkling Of How He Loves Us, We Are Repelled; It Seems So Cold, Indeed, Not Love At All As We Understand The Word.

I'm Always Amazed At The American Practice Of Allowing One Party To A Homosexual Act To Remain Passive--it's So Undemocratic. Sexmust Be Mutual.

What Is A Professor Of Poetry? How Can Poetry Be Professed?

Before People Complain Of The Obscurity Of Modern Poetry, They Should First Examine Their Consciences And Ask Themselves With How Many People And On How Many Occasions They Have Genuinely And Profoundly Shared Some Experience With Another...

Detective Stories Have Nothing To Do With Works Of Art.

Few Can Remember Clearly When Innocence Came To A Sudden End, The Moment At Which We Ask For The First Time: Am I Loved?

The Commonest Ivory Tower Is That Of The Average Man, The State Of Passivity Towards Experience.

Far From His Illness The Wolves Ran On Through The Evergreen Forests, The Peasant River Was Untempted By The Fashionable Quays; By Mourning Tongues The Death Of The Poet Was Kept From His Poems.

Stop All The Clocks, Cut Off The Telephone, Prevent The Dog From Barking With A Juicy Bone. Silence The Pianos And With Muffled Drum Bring Out The Coffin, Let The Mourners Come.

Evil Is Unspectacular And Always Human, And Shares Our Bed And Eats At Our Own Table.

Caesar's Double-bed Is Warm As An Unimportant Clerk Writes I Do Not Like My Work On A Pink Official Form.

A Poet, Qua Poet, Has Only One Political Duty, Namely, In His Own Writing To Set An Example Of The Correct Use Of His Mother Tongue, Which Is Always Being Corrupted. When Words Lose Their Meaning, Physical Force Takes Over.

Weep For The Lives Your Wishes Never Led.

Man Desires To Be Free And He Desires To Feel Important. This Places Him In A Dilemma, For The More He Emancipates Himself From Necessity The Less Important He Feels.

Every Poet Has His Dream Reader: Mine Keeps A Look Out For Curious Prosodic Fauna Like Bacchics And Choriambs.

Those To Whom Evil Is Donedo Evil In Return.

No Person Can Be A Great Leader Unless He Takes Genuine Joy In The Successes Of Those Under Him.

We Must Love One Another Or Die

Does God Judge Us By Appearances? I Suspect That He Does.

All I Have Is A Voice To Undo The Folded Lie, The Romantic Lie In The Brain Of The Sensual Man-in-the-street And The Lie Of Authority Whose Buildings Grope The Sky: There Is No Such Thing As The State And No One Exists Alone; Hunger Allows No Choice To The Citizen Or The Police; We Must Love One Another Or Die.

'healing,' Papa Would Tell Me, 'is Not A Science, But The Intuitive Art Of Wooing Nature.'

There Must Always Be Two Kinds Of Art: Escape-art, For Man Needs Escape As He Needs Food And Deep Sleep, And Parable-art, That Art Which Shall Teach Man To Unlearn Hatred And Learn Love.

Behind The Corpse In The Reservoir, Behind The Ghost On The Links, Behind The Lady Who Dances And The Man Who Madly Drinks, Under The Look Of Fatigue, The Attack Of Migraine And The Sigh There Is Always Another Story, There Is More Than Meets The Eye.

I Think The First Prerequisite To Civilization Is An Ability To Make Polite Conversation.

A Poet Must Never Make A Statement Simply Because It Is Sounds Poetically Exciting; He Must Also Believe It To Be True.

Death Is The Sound Of Distant Thunder At A Picnic.

Human Language Is Mythological And Metaphorical By Nature.

A Poet's Hope: To Be, Like Some Valley Cheese, Local, But Prized Elsewhere.

The Only Way To Spend New Year's Eve Is Either Quietly With Friends Or In A Brothel. Otherwise When The Evening Ends And People Pair Off, Someone Is Bound To Be Left In Tears.

Politics Cannot Be A Science, Because In Politics Theory And Practice Cannot Be Separated, And The Sciences Depend Upon Their Separation.

For Time Is Inches And The Heart's Changes, Where Ghost Has Haunted Lost And Wanted.

Whatever You Do, Good Or Bad, People Will Always Have Something Negative To Say

As Readers, We Remain In The Nursery Stage So Long As We Cannot Distinguish Between Taste And Judgment, So Long, That Is, As The Only Possible Verdicts We Can Pass On A Book Are Two: This I Like; This I Don't Like. For An Adult Reader, The Possible Verdicts Are Five: I Can See This Is Good And I Like It; I Can See This Is Good But I Don't Like It; I Can See This Is Good And, Though At Present I Don't Like It, I Believe That With Perseverance I Shall Come To Like It; I Can See That This Is Trash But I Like It; I Can See That This Is Trash And I Don't Like It.

Time Will Say Nothing But I Told You So.

Art Is Our Chief Means Of Breaking Bread With The Dead.

Breaking Silence

There Is No Such Thing As The State And No One Exists Alone; Hunger Allows No Choice To The Citizen Or The Police; We Must Love One Another Or Die.

There Is No Love; There Are Only The Various Envies, All Of Them Sad.

If It Really Was Queen Elizabeth Who Demanded To See Falstaff In A Comedy, Then She Showed Herself A Very Perceptive Critic. But Even In The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Falstaff Has Not And Could Not Have Found His True Home Because Shakespeare Was Only A Poet. For That He Was To Wait Nearly Two Hundred Years Till Verdi Wrote His Last Opera. Falstaff Is Not The Only Case Of A Character Whose True Home Is The World Of Music; Others Are Tristan, Isolde And Don Giovanni.

Nobody Is Ever Sent To Hell: He Or She Insists On Going There.

The Theater Has Never Been Any Good Since The Actors Became Gentlemen.

In Addition To English, At Least One Ancient Language, Probably Greek Or Hebrew, And Two Modern Languages Would Be Required.

If It Form The One Landscape That We The Inconstant Ones Are Consistently Homesick For, This Is Chiefly Because It Dissolves In Water.

Love Each Other Or Perish.

Love Each Other

The Camera May Do Justice To Laughter, But Must Degrade Sorrow.

Words Have No Word For Words That Are Not True.

Alone, Alone, About The Dreadful Wood / Of Conscious Evil Runs A Lost Mankind, / Dreading To Find Its Father.

Most People Enjoy The Sight Of Their Own Handwriting As They Enjoy The Smell Of Their Own Farts.

Genealogies Are Admirable Things, Provided They Do Not Encourage The Curious Delusion That Some Families Are Older Than Others.

A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods

Look If You Like, But You Will Have To Leap.

The True Men Of Action In Our Time Those Who Transform The World Are Not The Politicians And Statesmen But The Scientists. Unfortunately Poetry Cannot Celebrate Them Because Their Deeds Are Concerned With Things, Not Persons, And Are Therefore Speechless. When I Find Myself In The Company Of Scientists, I Feel Like A Shabby Curate Who Has Strayed By Mistake Into A Drawing Room Full Of Dukes.

Some Books Are Undeservedly Forgotten; None Are Undeservedly Remembered.

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