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… - W. H. Auden

The Three Wiseman:

The weather has been awful,
The countryside is dreary,
Marsh, jungle, rock; and echoes mock,
Calling our hope unlawful;
But a silly song can help along
Yours ever and sincerely:
At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners,
that this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners,
and miss our wives, our books, our dogs,
but have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are.
To discover how to be human now
Is the reason we follow this star.

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

"Human "nature" is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before."