W. H. Auden

To ask the hard question is simple.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,For poetry makes nothing happen.

To save your world you asked this man to dieWould this man, could he see you now, ask why

The words of a dead manAre modified in the guts of the living.

Let us honour if we canThe vertical manThough we value noneBut the horizontal one.

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to sayIs a keen observer of life,The word Intellectual suggests straight awayA man who's untrue to his wife.

Five minutes on even the nicest mountainIs awfully long.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say Sanctity is the state about which theology has nothing to say.

Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.

When I try to imagine a faultless loveOr the life to come, what I hear is the murmurOf underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

Lay your sleeping head, my love,Human on my faithless arm.

Private faces in public placesAre wiser and nicerThan public faces in private places.

Intellectual disgraceStares from every human face,And the seas of pity lieLocked and frozen in each eye.

Verse was a special illness of the earIntegrity was not enough.

God bless the USA, so large,So friendly, and so rich.

Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are shaggy dog stories they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.

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.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

To us he is no more a personNow but a climate of opinionUnder whom we conduct our differing lives.

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.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are contentThat he held the proper opinions for the time of yearWhen there was peace, he was for peace when there was war, he went.

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.