W. H. Auden
British-American · 1907–1973
Poet whose formal virtuosity, moral seriousness, and range — from intimate elegy to public prophecy — made him one of the defining voices of the twentieth century.
Wikipedia ↗“You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart.”
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“He was my North, my South, my East and West, / My working week and my Sunday rest, / My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; / I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
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“About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”
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“Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper.”
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“We must love one another or die.”
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Auden later revised this to "We must love one another and die," finding the original logically false, and eventually disowned the entire poem.