More from Wystan Hugh Auden

  1. All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: 'I refuse to be what I am.'
  2. In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement, it was also easier to tell a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some m…
  3. 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 par…
  4. To some degree every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a …
  5. 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 u…
  6. 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 wo…
  7. Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be termina…
  8. Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human d…

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