Wystan Uncut
Jul. 20th, 2022 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo Here's some good news. We're about to get a proper, scholarly edition of Auden's Collected Poems. I may well treat myself to a copy.
The collected editions issued and edited by Auden in his lifetime are horribly inadequate. Search for his masterpiece, "September 1, 1939" and it ain't there. The pernickety older writer took exception to some of the things his younger, wilder self had said in it and- after several hamfisted attempts at revision- got out the pruning knife and lopped it from the corpus. He lopped a lot of other things too. Poets shouldn't edit themselves. They have too much ego, the ego narrows with age and visionaries turn into theologians. It's a truism that poets die young- and so they should- the trouble is when they carry on writing- and rewriting- from beyond the grave.
I don't dislike the later Auden, he is clever, funny, mannered, odd- but he knew he'd lost that first fine careless rapture. There's a poem I like that addresses the issue. It's one of the chippings from the work bench he called "Shorts".
Bull-roarers cannot keep up the annual rain,
The water-table of a once green champaign
Sinks, will keep on sinking: but why complain? against odds,
Methods of dry-farming shall still produce grain.
Or- to interpret- when inspiration fails you can always fall back on the gifts that remain- intelligence, wit, technical dexterity- and still produce something readable.
Auden was always intelligent, witty, technically adept and sometimes- even in the early work- these qualities crowd out the poetry. In the later work there was no longer much poetry left to smother.
It's odd that someone who no longer had much poetry in him should sit in judgement on a younger self that was fizzing with the stuff- and not give him the benefit of the doubt- but there it goes! Auden wasn't the only major poet who tried to bugger up his own legacy.
But now all that carefully destructive work is undone and we're going to get the entire output, unfussed with, unexpurgated- as it first left his pen- with unpublished poems thrown in. Perhaps we'll have to revise our opinions- and wouldn't that be grand?
The collected editions issued and edited by Auden in his lifetime are horribly inadequate. Search for his masterpiece, "September 1, 1939" and it ain't there. The pernickety older writer took exception to some of the things his younger, wilder self had said in it and- after several hamfisted attempts at revision- got out the pruning knife and lopped it from the corpus. He lopped a lot of other things too. Poets shouldn't edit themselves. They have too much ego, the ego narrows with age and visionaries turn into theologians. It's a truism that poets die young- and so they should- the trouble is when they carry on writing- and rewriting- from beyond the grave.
I don't dislike the later Auden, he is clever, funny, mannered, odd- but he knew he'd lost that first fine careless rapture. There's a poem I like that addresses the issue. It's one of the chippings from the work bench he called "Shorts".
Bull-roarers cannot keep up the annual rain,
The water-table of a once green champaign
Sinks, will keep on sinking: but why complain? against odds,
Methods of dry-farming shall still produce grain.
Or- to interpret- when inspiration fails you can always fall back on the gifts that remain- intelligence, wit, technical dexterity- and still produce something readable.
Auden was always intelligent, witty, technically adept and sometimes- even in the early work- these qualities crowd out the poetry. In the later work there was no longer much poetry left to smother.
It's odd that someone who no longer had much poetry in him should sit in judgement on a younger self that was fizzing with the stuff- and not give him the benefit of the doubt- but there it goes! Auden wasn't the only major poet who tried to bugger up his own legacy.
But now all that carefully destructive work is undone and we're going to get the entire output, unfussed with, unexpurgated- as it first left his pen- with unpublished poems thrown in. Perhaps we'll have to revise our opinions- and wouldn't that be grand?
