This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
By mourning tongues the death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, an afternoon of nurses and rumors; the provinces of his body revolted, the squares of his mind were empty, silence invaded the suburbs. The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers. Now he is scattered over a hundred cities and wholly given over to unfamiliar affections; to find his happiness in another kind of wood and be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. [in memory of W.B. Yeats]
Earth |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.
We're members of each other — all of us — everything. The difference is not whether you are or not, but whether you know you are or not. Because we're all under each other's influence. We're all are affected by one another's others’ lives and decisions. And there is no escape from this membership.
Earth |
This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part the free world seems to be regarding it as merely normal.
Earth | Reflection |
We haven't accepted — we can't really believe — that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so. And we still think and behave as though we face an unspoiled continent, with thousands of acres of living space for every man. We still sing "America the Beautiful" as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Will it alter my life altogether?
Convention | Earth | Nothing |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
But, back of this, still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking in the great night a new religious ideal. Someday the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of 10,000,000 souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living - Liberty, Justice and Right - is marked For White People Only.
Desire | Earth | Understand |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
We would rather be ruined than changed, We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die.
Earth |
Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.
Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life...(How happy scientists are! Why didn't we become scientists, Percival? They confront problems which can be solved. We don't know what we confront. Does it have a name?)
Earth | Father | Fear | Good | Knowing | Men | Nothing | People | Will | Think |
I have finished my combat with the sun; and my body, the old animal, knows nothing more.
Earth |
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Earth |
They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.
The great ship, Balayne, lay frozen in the sea. The one-foot stars were couriers of its death to the wild limits of its habitation. These were not tepid stars of torpid places but bravest at midnight and in lonely spaces, they looked back at Hans' look with savage faces.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream - Call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one, and bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress as they are used to wear, and let the boys bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be the finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal, lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet on which she embroidered fantails once and spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come to show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.