Auden's excision
tinwhistler
http://tinyurl.com/2rg9qo
[excerpt]
I have long had in my head some lines of poetry by W. H. Auden written
"In Memory of W. B. Yeats" but couldn't find them in Auden's
"Collected Poems." Thanks to Prof. Nicholas Jenkins at Stanford, co-
chairman of the Auden Society, I have found out why: The British poet
wrote the poem in 1939, soon after coming to live in the U.S., in
response to Yeats's death. In the 1960s, he revised his poem, cutting
out the poignant lines I remembered. Here they are, for those writers
and readers inclined to hold relevant verse in memory:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives.
[end excerpt]
I'm thinking Samuel Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and
others who have lived by language, were unforgiven by time, and Auden,
knowing such to be true, took out the contrary assertion. Other
theories for Auden's excision?
Aloha ~~~ Ozzie Maland ~~~ San Diego
Mike Lyle
Hmm. You reckon time hasn't been kind to Coleridge, Woolf, or Plath? I
think they're pretty well respected by those who care.
As for why he excised it, it seems to me it came out because it wasn't
very good. "Indifferent in a week/ To a beautiful physique", forsooth!
--
Mike.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
Martin Ambuhl
Saffire quotes lines 46-51. Actually the cut was somewhat larger, lines
46-57. And he replaces Auden's semicolon with a full stop.
It is no surprise that my Taylor & Hall _Poetry in English_ (1963) has
these lines, but it is interesting that the Lehman _The Oxford Book of
American Poetry_ (2006) has them. It isn't a question of preserving the
contents of the old edition: Ellman's 1976 edition didn't have Auden at
all. Those lines are also present in John Wain's _The Oxford Anthology
of English Poetry: Blake to Heaney_ (vol. 2 of the Anthology, 1990).
Everything below is from the note to line 45 from the editors of
_The Norton Anthology of Poetry_, one of the few anthologies to omit
the relevant lines:
" Three stanzas that originally followed this were omitted in the 1966
edition of Auden's _Collected Shorter Poems_ and thereafter:
' Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.'
" Kipling's views were imperialistic and jingoistic; Paul Claudel
(1868-1955), French poet, dramatists, and diplomat, was an extreme
right-winger in his political idea. Yeats' own politics were at times
antidemocratic and appeared to favor dictatorship."
tinwhistler
wrote:
I agree that time worships language, and that the three writers did
so. Religious creeds that postulate worshipping God over everything
else declare the worship of language a blasphemy. I don't so
declare. I respect those three writers, but I have a problem with
suicide -- this is the one action beyond God's own capability, and
indulging in it lacks the degree of reverence I am seeking to attain.
"Help me venerate the sacred now" -- a motto/mantra for me that
proscribes suicide except as as escape from intolerable pain. I
forgive the three writers because I accept their pain as intolerable
-- but I am not "time" and the three writers have a stain on their
reps in the estimations of many, IMHO.
tinwhistler
[snip]
> " Kipling's views were imperialistic and jingoistic; Paul Claudel
> (1868-1955), French poet, dramatists, and diplomat, was an extreme
> right-winger in his political idea. Yeats' own politics were at times
> antidemocratic and appeared to favor dictatorship."
Great posting -- thanks. I see the Norton editors putting a little
pro-democracy spin on their anthology by accepting Auden's excision --
possibly he even made the excision at the behest of those editors.
Whether Kipling is pardonable is controversial today. Can this theory
for the excision be called the "spin theory?"
Alan Jones
There was a TV (UK) biography of Auden last week, on the centenary of his
birth, in which a clip was played from an interview with the poet. He said
that his changes to some poems and the removal of others from his Collected
Poems were on account of what he by then saw as poor verse or plain nonsense
(as an example of that he quoted the line "We must love one another or
die"). He denied wishing to censor the political opinions he held at an
earlier time. He would not give permission for a re-print of the earlier
versions.
I seem to remember, but can't recall details, that Worsdworth similarly
revised early work for technical reasons, in effect also obscuring the
radicalism of his youth.
Alan Jones
John Kane
wrote:
But why did Auden go to the USA just because Yeats died?
Arcadian Rises
>
> - Show quoted text -
In other words, the excision was in fact censorship dictated by
political correctness.
tinwhistler
[snip]
> But why did Auden go to the USA just because Yeats died?
What, you dare satirize Safire? Next to our prez, he's our greatest
dictator.
Marius Hancu
wrote:
> The British poet
> wrote the poem in 1939, soon after coming to live in the U.S., in
> response to Yeats's death.
Some of you may find interesting this book extract, available on the
net:
-----
Later Auden
By EDWARD MENDELSON
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
http://partners.nytimes.com/books/first/m/mendelson-auden.html
-----
which starts by referring to the situation.
Marius Hancu
Mike Lyle
> political correctness.
But the authorial views expressed are entirely "progressive": he's
expressing disapproval of time's behaviour. It would have been more "PC"
to have left them in.
It's still pretty poor poetry. That whole Part III of In Memory of WBY
is a bit jingly, and I think it's better in the revised version. We
don't need those self-indulgent bits about Kipling and Claudel,
especially in a tribute to somebody else. In any case, it isn't as if
the change robbed us of one of our language's treasures.
tinwhistler
[snip]
> Some of you may find interesting this book extract, available on the
> net:
> -----
> Later Auden
> By EDWARD MENDELSON
> Farrar, Straus and Girouxhttp://partners.nytimes.com/books/first/m/mendelson-auden.html
> -----
> which starts by referring to the situation.
[sni]
Edward Mendelson's book [per Ch 1 at the link] supports the "spin/PC"
theory for the excision (OP). Mendelson writes,
"... Before his elegy for Yeats soared above politics in its final
stanzas, Auden took the trouble to score partisan points against the
right-wing views of Rudyard Kipling, Paul Claudel, and Yeats himself,
views that needed to be pardoned by time; his own left-wing views,
implicitly, needed to be pardoned by no one...."
That is, Auden was "unscoring" his partisan points by taking the
points out. The Ch 1 set out at the link is interesting for all sorts
of reasons, including its relevance to this thread. (Thanks, Marius.)
Joe Fineman
> It's still pretty poor poetry.
So much the better for poor poetry. It has stuck in my mind as wellas
tinwhistler's.
--
--- Joe Fineman jo...@verizon.net
||: Had enough? Drop dead. :||
Mike Lyle
> "MikeLyle" <mike_lyle...@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk> writes:
> > It's still pretty poor poetry.
>
> So much the better for poor poetry. It has stuck in my mind as wellas
> tinwhistler's.
Yes, but isn't that another part of the problem? What stuck in your
minds from the section wasn't what he was actually trying to say. When
a detail is more conspicuous than the subject, it's time to repaint.
In any case, I hope we can agree that the change wasn't politically
motivated.
--
Mike.