As a poet – not as a citizen – there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that is particularly serious now. It’s being so quickly corrupted. "Speech is the mother of thought, not the hand-maiden." When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and that leads to violence. As a citizen obviously one has a host of political duties. The issues are too obvious to go into. But that’s as a citizen. My only duty as a poet is to defend the use of language.
W.H. Auden, born on this day in 1907
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