sions afterwards for their greater subtlety and depth. For most readers this book will be a First Auden, and the later I
collections are recommended as a Second. j
Most criticism, however, has taken a censorious view of '
Auden's revisions, and the issue is an important one because I
behind it is a larger dispute about Auden's theory of poetry. f
In making his revisions, and in justifying them as he did, Auden was systematically rejecting a whole range of modernist assumptions about poetic form, the nature of poetic language, and the effects of poetry on its audience. Critics who find the changes deplorable generally argue, in effect, that a '
poet loses his right to revise or reject his work after he publishes it—as if the skill with which he brought his poems from their early drafts to the point of publication somehow left him at the moment they appeared, making him a trespasser on his own work thereafter. This argument presupposes the romantic notion that poetic form is, or ought to be, "organic," that an authentic poem is shaped by its own internal forces rather than by the external effects of craft; versions of this ;
idea survived as central tenets of modernism. In revising his poems, Auden opened his workshop to the public, and the spectacle proved unsettling, especially as his revisions, unlike Yeats', moved against the current of literary fashion. In the later part of his career, he increasingly called attention in his essays to the technical aspects of verse, the details of metrical and stanzaic construction—much as Brecht had brought his stagehands into the full view of the audience. The goal in each case was to remove the mystery that surrounds works of art, to explode the myth of poetic inspiration, and to deny any special privileges to poetry in the realm of language or to artists in the realm of ethics.
Critics mistook this attitude as a "rejection" of poetry,
when in fact it was a recognition of its potential effects. The most notorious aspect of Auden's revisions, as of his whole poetic theory, was his insistence that a poem must not be "dishonest," must not express beliefs that a poet does not actually hold, no matter how rhetorically effective he finds them. In Auden's view, poetry could not be exempted from ethical standards of truth or falsehood: a poem could be a lie, and what was more serious, a poetic lie could be more persuasive in the public realm than lies less eloquently expressed. Words had the potential to do good or evil, whether their source was political discourse or the ordered images of a poem. Auden's sense of the effect of poetic language—like Brecht's sense of the effect of stage performance—differs entirely from the modernist theory that sets poetry apart from the world, either in an interior psychological arena or in the enclosed garden of reflexivity where poems refer only to themselves. Already in the thirties, Auden's political poems assumed they had the power to affect attitudes, and therefore indirectly to affect action; his later judgements on those poems made the same assumption, but from a very different moral perspective. In the first version of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" Auden had written that time would pardon writers like Kipling and Claudel for their right-wing views; the implication was that the left-wing views held by Auden and his audience were consonant with the force of history and would need no forgiveness whatever. Auden soon found this less easy to believe than he did when he wrote it, and was less willing to encourage such complacency in his readers. He dropped the stanzas about Kipling and Claudel, and dropped entirely such poems as "Spain" where the "struggle" is more important than its consequences and goodness is equated with victory, or "September 1, 1939" where a rhetorical sleight-of-hand grants the moral value of just actions to the ironic "messages" of the isolated just. These poems are memorable enough to survive all of Auden's interference, and there are ancient and vigorous critical standards by which they must be judged great art; still, when Auden called them "trash which he is ashamed to have written" he was taking them far more seriously—and taking poetic language far more seriously—than his critics ever did.
Too seriously, most readers would argue. Yet the revisions Auden made in the forties, like the changes in his life and work, effectively put into practice the doubts he had experienced earlier. He had embedded an allegory of his mixed feelings into The Ascent of F6, a play written with Christopher Isherwood in 1936. The play traces the destruction of a mountain climber (Auden's dramatic representative), at the moment of his greatest triumph, as a result of the conflicts inherent in a public role his private terrors tempted him to accept. Auden avoided a parallel fate by leaving England for America at the height of his fame, and by working to expunge from his poetry the tendencies that he sensed might otherwise have destroyed him and his poetry together. Later he could write more tolerantly of the temptation to "ruin a fine tenor voice I For effects that bring down the house," but by that time, having defeated his public temptations, he had set out to conquer his private ones also. The poems he wrote in this period, in the forties and after, are less immediately compelling than his earlier ones, but more profound and more rewarding in the long term. His masterpiece is arguably "The Sea and the Mirror" (its nearest rivals may be "New Year Letter" and "Horae Canonicae"), whose longest section, "Caliban to the Audience," is the work he preferred to all his others. It had been the most recalcitrant in conception—he was stalled six months before he could work out its form— and the most pleasurable in the writing; and it confronted most directly and comprehensively the limits and powers of his art, and its temptations and possibilities.
This selection includes poems chosen from all of Auden's books of verse; a note on sources may be found at the back. The texts are those of first publication in book form, modified only by the rare minor revisions Auden made within a few months of publication, and by the correction of misprints.
The arrangement is chronological, except where Auden arranged a group of poems written at different times into a single sequence; dates of composition are appended to each poem. I have tried to include examples from the full range of Auden's work in all its enormous variety of form, rhetoric and content; the only major formal omission, I believe, results from the impossibility of including either of the two long verse-letters, which took up too many pages to reprint in full and proved unamenable to abridgment. One long poem, "The Sea and the Mirror," is printed complete, and excerpts from other longer works are included only in cases where Auden printed the same excerpts as separate poems. The titles, or lack of titles in the early work, correspond to the usage in the first editions; the titles used for excerpts from "The Age of Anxiety" are those Auden used when he printed them in periodicals. No selection from a great poet has ever been satisfactory—a rule I know has not been broken by this one.
E.M.
w. H. AUDEN
Selected Poems
NEW EDITION
Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to the wood,
An industry already comatose,
Yet sparsely living. A ramshackle engine
At Cashwell raises water; for ten years
It lay in flooded workings until this,
Its latter office, grudgingly performed,
And further here and there, though many dead
Lie under the poor soil, some acts are chosen
Taken from recent winters; two there were