Defenseless 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.
W.H. Auden
Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
poetry
For the error bred in the boneOf each woman and each manCraves what it cannot have, Not universal loveBut to be loved alone.
In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
poetry language words
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night. Accurate scholarship canUnearth the whole offenceFrom Luther until nowThat has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago madeA psychopathic god: I and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knewAll that a speech can sayAbout Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talkTo an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral airWhere blind skyscrapers useTheir full height to proclaimThe strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vainCompetitive excuse: But who can live for longIn an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's faceAnd the international wrong. Faces along the barCling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspireTo make this fort assumeThe furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the nightWho have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trashImportant Persons shoutIs not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wroteAbout DiaghilevIs true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the boneOf each woman and each manCraves what it cannot have, Not universal loveBut to be loved alone. From the conservative darkInto the ethical lifeThe dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife,I'll concentrate more on my work,'And helpless governors wakeTo resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb?All I have is a voiceTo undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brainOf the sensual man-in-the-streetAnd the lie of AuthorityWhose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the StateAnd no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the nightOur world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages: May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair, Show an affirming flame.
poetry war tyranny evil world-war-ii dictatorship
A.E. Housman'No one, not even Cambridge was to blame(Blame if you like the human situation): Heart-injured in North London, he becameThe Latin Scholar of his generation. Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust, Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer; Food was his public love, his private lustSomething to do with violence and the poor. In savage foot-notes on unjust editionsHe timidly attacked the life he led, And put the money of his feelings onThe uncritical relations of the dead, Where only geographical divisionsParted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.
You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
poetry human-nature
If you want romance, fuck a journalist.
romance quote sex
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.
reading
A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.
reading growth guidance pleasure taste
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.
reading educational consciousness
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.
science
The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.
truth
No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.
ego writers egotism novelists
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