"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."
-W. H. Auden
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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.“
-W. H. Auden
posted in Poetry
Other Quotes by W. H. Auden
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"Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest."
-W. H. Auden
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"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."
-W. H. Auden
RelationshipView Quote
"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."
-W. H. Auden
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"Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh."
-W. H. Auden
LoveView Quote
"Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be."
-W. H. Auden
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"I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry."
-John Donne
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"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
-Leonard Cohen
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"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."
-Robert Frost
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"The poetry of the earth is never dead."
-John Keats
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"There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry."
-Emily Dickinson
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"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry."
-Emily Dickinson
PoetryView Quote