Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin 2015 Individual chapters © Contributors 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–45292–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Auden at work / edited by Bonnie Costello, Rachel Galvin. pages cm ISBN 978–1–137–45292–4 (hardback) I. Costello, Bonnie, editor. II. Galvin, Rachel Judith, editor. PR6001.U4Z55 2015 811’.52––dc23 2015012339
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4
Contents
List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Notes on Contributors x
Introduction 1 Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin 1 “Still Doing It By Hand”: Auden and the Typewriter 5 Hannah Sullivan 2 Auden’s 1939 Journal: A Wartime Writer at Work 24 Rachel Galvin 3 Vehicles of the Ordinary: W. H. Auden and Cinematic Address 49 Jonathan Foltz 4 Stages in Life’s Way: Theatres of W. H. Auden 69 Daniel Jean 5 Auden and the Art of Illustration 86 Emily Hyde 6 A Marriage of True Minds: Collaborative Creativity in the Auden–Kallman Libretti 111 Reena Sastri 7 Setting Out for “Atlantis” 133 Bonnie Costello 8 The Fallen Empire 156 Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb 9 Shakespeare’s Auden 179 Michael Wood 10 “Thinking-Intuitive Types”: Poetic Affinities in W. H. Auden and Paul Valéry 191 Lisa Goldfarb 11 Auden’s Preoccupations: Education and The Orators 216 Evan Kindley 12 Auden’s Cold War Fame 231 Justin Quinn
v
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 vi Contents
13 Auden and the Work of The Age of Anxiety 250 Claire Seiler 14 “No Permission to be Idle”: W. H. Auden’s Work Ethics 275 Tony Sharpe
Select Bibliography 294 Index 305
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4
Introduction Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin
When an interviewer asked W. H. Auden near the end of his life if he ever went back and corrected his work, he replied,
Oh yes, because I agree very much with Paul Valéry, who said: “A poem is never finished; it’s only abandoned.” It isn’t that one revises ideas, but one is aware that the language isn’t right. It is too vague or is unmusical. You feel “I want to tighten it up.” One can never tell how good or bad something one writes is, but what one can tell—not always at once but sooner or later—is whether a poem is authentic, that is, really written in one’s handwriting or forgery.1
The changes Auden made to poems he viewed as “forgeries” have become some of the most famous revisions in the history of twentieth-century poetry. The prime example, “September 1, 1939,” he saw as a forgery because “the rhetoric is far too inflated,” as he told his interviewer.2 But Auden also revised other, “authentic” poems, sometimes multiple times, even after they had been in print for decades. Revision was also an intricate part of his com- position process. Stephen Spender reported that Auden would save the “best lines” from his early drafts, using “lines from a rejected poem” in a new one “as though a poem were not a single experience but a mosaic held together by the consistency of an atmosphere, a rhythm, or an idea common to all its parts.”3 Writing, for him, was ongoing work that reflected the turning of mind and circumstance—and all his scraps and drafts were fair game. Auden’s restless revision at every stage of his career has received less critical attention than his shifts with regard to religion and politics. One of the aims of the essays collected here is to delve into the trove of Auden’s papers—his drafts, notes, correspondence, diaries, incidental reviews, and talks—for what they can tell us about his writing process. In so doing, the volume draws attention to Auden’s artistic practice: his rigorous discipline, his self-critical imagination, his active engagement with everything he read, his compulsion to transform his work, and his constant reflection on the
1
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 2 Auden at Work nature of creativity. Genetic criticism (critique génétique) provides an apt framework, in that it treats the published text as part of an unfolding pro- cess of composition, rather than as a terminal result of authorial intention. It seeks to offer a dynamic sense of the author’s lived experience and writing’s historical context. It is an approach that emphasizes “movement, action, creative gesture, solidified ephemera”4 and aims to reconstruct the “the chain of events in a writing process.”5 Valéry once wrote that literary composition can be considered “as a dance, as fencing, as the construction of acts and expectations,”6 and texts might thus be compared to “the footprints on the ground after a dance is over,” as the editors of Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes write.7 In this spirit, Auden at Work takes up Auden’s unpublished and unexplored archival material (the documents that preceded and surrounded his texts, the avant-texte) to understand the nature of his writing and his formal craft. Auden was also continually revising his ideas about the role and function of poetry. In a notebook he kept from about 1945, he jotted down a series of metaphors for poetry. He begins: “A poem or a novel is a gratuitous not a use- ful object like a lathe or an automobile. […] nor a consumer’s good offered for consumption, like a tin of soup, which once it has been eaten and so depleted leaves no permanent influence.”8 The image of the automobile seems to pay homage to the venerable roots of the term “metaphor,” to carry, transfer, or transport—so central to poetry—but Auden casts it aside. After crossing out several phrases, he decides that a poem or novel (“if it has any merit”) is actu- ally a “useful object” like a lathe. After all, the poet “designs it for human pur- poses which he knows in advance.” Also, “it is intended to endure—to be read any number of times by any number of people, as a lathe is intended to be used any number of times.” The poem is a tool here, not a finished product, and the reader uses it to make his own meaning and pleasure. It may sharpen or even shape the mind of its reader. But maybe a poem is like a can of soup after all, Auden continues: “On the other hand it is like a new tin of soup and unlike a lathe, in that the author cannot know his public in advance.” Ultimately, he is not really interested in deciding the issue—a poem or novel is all of these things, and none of them. But together, these comparisons suggest that poetry is something everyday and useful; they also associate poetry with process, and writing with exploration. The usefulness (and changeability) of poets and poetry are themes that emerge in this volume, as our contributors take a range of approaches to the idea of Auden “at work.” As Tony Sharpe shows, Auden thought a great deal about the nature of work in its technical and moral dimensions. Several essays consider the work Auden did to make a living—as journalist, teacher, reviewer, and interviewer—in conjunction with his literary practice. Evan Kindley explores how Auden’s experience as a student and then as a teacher shaped his representation of poetic and social authority. Justin Quinn shows that while we may think of Auden’s fame as a consequence of his creative
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Introduction 3 work, it also bore an influence on it, shaping his rhetorical stance and sub- ject matter during the Cold War era. Auden’s imagination thrived on dialogue with other writers. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb demonstrates how Auden worked out his ideas about history and his differences from poets of reverie like Baudelaire and Yeats, and propagandists of empire like Kipling, in his radio plays, poems, and reviews. There are unexpected affinities here—Lisa Goldfarb reveals the extent to which Auden, although we might think of him as anti-Symbolist, was deeply interested in the work of Valéry, the Symbolist and theorist of creative process. Michael Wood explores how handwritten drafts of The Sea and the Mirror reveal Auden’s long engagement with The Tempest, and the striking differences between his early plans and the “Commentary” he actu- ally wrote. Auden at work is not always Auden alone. Throughout his career he sought to collaborate with other artists—Isherwood, MacNeice, Kallman, Britten, Stravinsky, and many more. Reena Sastri investigates Auden’s crea- tive partnerships, linking lived experiences to themes of collaboration in his work. Daniel Jean shows that even when Auden leaves behind the Group Theatre, his desire to participate in theater continues to influence his writ- ing and creative alliances. Working with other artists also allowed Auden to explore a variety of media, from film and drama to opera and oratorio. Jonathan Foltz discusses Auden’s engagement with the formal tensions and possibilities of voice-over narration in documentary film. Emily Hyde looks at the structural choices and implicit arguments Auden makes as he selects and juxtaposes photographs and text. There is, of course, a long and venerable history to readers’ interest in how a writer composes and the secrets that drafts may divulge. Samuel Johnson remarked in the late eighteenth century that “It is pleasant to see great works in their seminal state, pregnant with latent possibilities of excellence; nor could there be any more delightful entertainment than to trace their gradual growth and expansion, and to observe how they are sometimes suddenly advanced by accidental hints, and sometimes slowly improved by steady meditation.”9 But examining Auden’s drafts and notes today reveals more than just the transformations of his texts. His practice of revision was intimately intertwined with his theory of poetry, Edward Mendelson suggests: “The acts of revision performed in secret by a poet were acts of compulsion. Auden, recognizing this, worked in his own acts of revision to balance the compulsion that he necessarily practiced on his words by renouncing any form of compulsion over his readers.”10 When he revised, he “repeatedly rejected his most compelling metaphors, and called attention to his own artifice.” Just so, he sought out poetic structures and habits of composition that would constrain his practice. Hannah Sullivan argues that Auden’s dislike of the typewriter was both technical and ideological, and writing by hand was part of his project of literary conservatism
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 4 Auden at Work and classicism. As Bonnie Costello shows, his notebooks reveal Auden to be a deliberate and innovative formalist, whose compositional process often involved laying out a pattern before his thought had been verbalized. Rachel Galvin examines Auden’s 1939 journal, demonstrating that it was composed according to the same systematic strategy of juxtaposition that marks his wartime poems. This strategy, she argues, is a reaction to the war news Auden was receiving via the newspaper. Claire Seiler demonstrates that the interviews Auden conducted as a United States strategic bombing research analyst in Germany after World War II ultimately informed The Age of Anxiety. The essays collected here explore the tentacular process of artistic creativity: the excursions, errors, and errancy, deletions, dead ends, and discoveries, on the page and off. Their aim is to help us better appreciate Auden’s works by tracking Auden at work.
Notes
1. W. H. Auden and Brendan Kennelly, “Auden on Opera, Detective Writers, Wit, Politics...,” Swarthmore College Bulletin Alumni Issue, May 1972, 5. 2. Ibid. 3. Stephen Spender, “W. H. Auden and His Poetry,” in Monroe K. Spears, ed., Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays, Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 28–9. 4. Michel Contat, Denis Hollier and Jacques Neefs, “Editors’ Preface,” Yale French Studies, no. 89 (January 1, 1996), 4. 5. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 3. 6. Cahiers/Notebooks. Ed. Brian Stimpson, Paul Gifford, and Robert Pickering. Trans. Robert Pickering (“Ego Scriptor”) and Norma Rinsler (“Poetry”). 2 vols. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000. Cited in Deppman et al., Genetic Criticism, 6. 7. Deppman et al., Genetic Criticism, 11. 8. Holograph Notebook 1945–61, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 9. Johnson, Samuel. Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Brady and W.K. Wimsatt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, 407. Cited in Deppman et al., Genetic Criticism, 3. 10. Edward Mendelson, “Revision and Power: The Example of W. H. Auden,” Yale French Studies, no. 89 (1996), 106.
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 1 “Still Doing It By Hand”: Auden and the Typewriter Hannah Sullivan
“The French call a typewriter a machine for writing; Auden, often, is a machine for generalizing.”1 This is Randall Jarrell being witty—and unpleas- ant. In the next paragraph of this, his first lecture on Auden, he goes on in a peculiar and extended metaphor to compare Auden’s dialectically con- structed prose pieces to “meringues that tower like cumuli beside the goose- eggs of facts on which they were founded.” Auden’s prose was usually written on a typewriter and, sometimes, fueled by Benzedrine, caffeine, and nicotine, at an apparently mechanical speed. But what about the poetry? Jarrell’s criticism of Auden’s poetry is more circumspect, but all the same, and like many other critics, he seems trou- bled by a fear of mechanical facility. In a 1941 review of New Year Letter, he speaks of Auden’s “easy virtuosity” but worries that the poem is ethi- cally a bit dubious (“there is a faint sugary smell of tout comprendre est tout pardonner”).2 Using the same phrase in 1947, reviewing The Age of Anxiety, Delmore Schwartz presses a little harder on “his easy virtuosity, which is at times too easy.”3 English reviewers had sometimes noticed the same thing. In 1932, Graham Greene commented on The Orators: “Mr. Auden’s virtuos- ity is amazing. He uses the whole language without self-consciousness.”4 The blurb, possibly written by T. S. Eliot, for the 1944 Faber edition of For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, worries that this virtuosity has been prone “to distract the attention” and “interpose … obstruction between the reader and the meaning.”5 More recent critics have concurred, noting his “astonishing technical mastery,” “effortless lyricism,” and “famous metrical virtuosity.”6 For Paul Hendon, his “was a Shakespearean gift, not just in its magnitude but in its unsettling—and unsettling especially to its possessor— characteristic of making anything said sound truer than true.”7 It was not only Auden’s critics who had this form of anxiety. The poet himself was troubled by the same concern about facility when he came to reread and, very often, to revise his work. In fact, he was to justify his relentless habit of post-publication revision on the same grounds; in fashioning an elegant superfice of style, had he neglected what was truthful?
5
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 6 Auden at Work
In this essay, I want to assess the claim that Auden’s facility or virtuos- ity is too easy, more about sound than sense, rhetorical power than truth, and, specifically, I want to address this question and his habit of retroactive correction via his writing process. Viewed comparatively, as a writer of the early- to mid-twentieth century, were his processes of composition unusual? And what might his virtuosic style, his disquieting fondness for rhetoric, have to do with the typewriter? Born a half-generation after the high mod- ernists, Auden came of age as a poet in a world where the typewriter was a staple. He spent his boyhood worshiping “those beautiful machines that never talked,” and went up to Oxford on a scholarship to read Natural Sciences.8 (He soon changed to English, in which he received a third-class degree.) And yet, despite being intellectually hospitable to the machine age and the chemical life, he remained a poet who wrote largely by hand. He claimed in 1962 to “loathe” the typewriter, and to find it useful only as a tool for self-distancing and defamiliarization.9 I will be suggesting that his dislike of the typewriter became more mean- ingful as a preference over the course of his career, and that its significance was both technical and ideological: writing by hand helped with his careful focus on prosody and technique, including an elaborate habit of sound- driven revision, and, over time, it became one of several strategies in a project of literary conservatism and classicism. In 1933, when he sent five sonnets to Geoffrey Grigson for publication in New Verse, he submitted them in manuscript, a material choice unusual enough for the editor to notice: “They came on half sheets of notepaper, on long sheets of lined foolscap, in that writing an airborne daddy long-legs might have managed with one dangling leg, sometimes in pencil, sometimes smudged and still less easy to decipher. They had to be typed before they went to the printer, and in the act of typing each poem established itself.” Grigson’s sense that the poem only really instantiated itself as a poem once liberated from its insecty, smudged manuscript form is of a piece with Pound’s procrastinat- ing comment in 1921, on the manuscript of The Waste Land, “Bad but can’t attack until I get typescript.” In fact, many publishers had stopped accepting unsolicited handwritten submissions by the early 1920s. It was not yet quite the moment when William Burroughs could advise (quoting Sinclair Lewis), “if you want to be a writer, learn to type,” but in sticking to pen and paper Auden was already being medially conservative by the early 1930s.10 Over the next four decades, as literature began to be written directly on to the machine, and as older writers adapted themselves to new technologies, this preference became more remarkable. First, some caveats. Literary criticism has had very little to say about the connection between the typewriter and style, specifically modernist style. Marshall McLuhan, back in 1964, wondered why so few studies had been written after the model of Theodora Bosanquet’s excellent Henry James at Work: “it should have been followed by other studies of how
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 “Still Doing It By Hand” 7 the typewriter has altered English verse and prose, and, indeed, the very mental habits, themselves, of writers.”11 Hugh Kenner’s little book from 1987 The Mechanical Muse remains one of the few attempts to trace out the relationship between twentieth-century writing technologies and modern- ist experiment. Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, published in German in 1986, only began to attract attention in English-speaking criticism in the last decade; it was first published in English translation by Stanford in 1999. But I want to be careful about assuming, as Kittler does, that work written on the typewriter is prone to being itself some- how mechanical. This is a kind of genetic fallacy, in taking a work’s kind or source of origin for its essence. Kittler reminds us that Nietzsche said “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” but his book can be simplistic in terms of literary analysis, with many of his stylistic claims proceeding deterministically: “Malling Hansen’s writing ball, with its operating difficulties, made Nietzsche into a laconic.”12 Second, we need to distinguish carefully between using the typewriter as a tool for writing and using it as a tool for what Bolter and Grusin term “remediation.” The online exhibition “W. H. Auden at Swarthmore” leads off with a photo- graph of the poet’s Underwood typewriter, dated 1942–45. But what do we know about how he actually used it? Was he writing straight onto the machine, drafting poems from the very first moment of composition by pressing keys, or was he simply using the typewriter to produce fair copies? Writers’ functional use of technology cannot be understood or explained merely via their competence. It is true that James Joyce had to send Ulysses out for typing, because of his failing eyesight, and that the errors and mis- takes that were then introduced in the process of typing up became an important part of the textual history of the novel. It is also true that Henry James began dictating his novels when his handwriting became too difficult to read, and so perhaps the syntactic tortuousness of his late style may be explained in terms of a physical limitation. But other writers who owned typewriters and could use them perfectly well for business purposes never- theless chose not to for literary work, particularly poetry. The classic genetic document of high modernism is a typescript with manuscript marginalia: some writers (Eliot, Pound, Woolf) typed up their own work from manuscript drafts and then retroactively made changes by hand, almost as if they were altering proof; others (Joyce, Hemingway) had typescripts made for them by third-party typists and corrected those. In both cases, modernist writers were treating the typewritten page as something almost already complete, as a stage between the privacy of writing and drafting by hand and a public document that could be read and edited. Marshall McLuhan noted in 1964 that the typewriter “fuses composition and publication,” and suggested that its unjustified right-hand margins might have contributed, in ways “hard to discover,” to the development of verse libre in the twentieth century.13 Once again, however, we must be cautious in distinguishing between poets who
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 8 Auden at Work use the carriage return to produce line endings during original composition, and those who act only as their own compositors, and reproduce the line endings of handwritten drafts on typewritten fair copies. McLuhan picks out Eliot and Pound as writers for whom “the typewriter was an oral and mimetic instrument that gave them the colloquial freedom of the world of jazz and ragtime” (262), citing the jazzy, demotic rhythms of Sweeney Agonistes as evidence. But, once again, Eliot wrote this fragmentary play by hand, and the surviving typescripts are copies of autograph manuscripts. It was not until the postwar period that large numbers of writers began to write directly onto the machine; Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Jack Kerouac were three young men who celebrated the freedom, even the neo-romantic spontaneity, of working directly on a typewriter. For O’Hara, as for Kerouac, speed and spontaneity were of the essence. He revised little “because he usually got what he was after in one draft, and he could type very fast, hunt-and-peck fashion.”14 More importantly, he spoke of “playing” the typewriter as lovingly as a musical instrument, as if it had ceased to be a prosthesis or tool and become instead a kind of accompanist, producing a Coleridgean effect of “rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere.”15 Like romantic lyrics, his lunch poems are temporally suspended, over and done with in the moment they announce as their topic, “It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering/ if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch/ ah lunch!”16 The long poem written “For the Chinese New Year” ends with the insistent but ambiguous deixis of “you will die not knowing this is true this year.”17 The proper names are deictic in a specific way, but without specifying the full identity of the individuals named for the reader (Norman, Joan, Jean-Paul: the surnames are withheld). So, too, the poems’ meticulous but private geographies refer back not too much to the universal “now” of romantic lyric, a now that can be appropriated by anyone at any point, but to the very particular, spontaneous moment of production. Marjorie Perloff terms it a “poetic world … of immanence rather than transcendence.”18 These are not poems that include history, as Pound’s Cantos notoriously meant to do, or aspire to its conclusion. They have the “perfect freedom” of diary, as Helen Vendler argues, and perhaps they are helped in this direction by the typewriter, where the first draft—with its spaces and indentations already added—can resemble fairly closely the final product.19 A. R. Ammons’ 1965 poem Tape for the Turn of the Year is another typewritten poem that fetishizes potential energy and spontaneity, seeing these forces as somehow lodged in the machine, and it presents itself directly as a series of dated entries.20
I get weak in the knees (feel light in the head) when I look down
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 “Still Doing It By Hand” 9
and see how much footage is tightly wound in that roll…
In this first entry, dated “6 Dec:” Ammons is quite programmatically anti- modernist, opposed to the kind of depth-structures that modernist typing up and revision tended to produce. This is no new Waste Land, the poet tells us, venerating instead:
clarity & simplicity!
no muffled talk, fragments of phrases, linked without logical links, strung together in obscurities supposed to reflect density…
But in the very next entry, dated “7 Dec:” a form of self-reflexive critique, a visible structure of revision, has already begun. Note how the typewriter’s ampersand works to produce a halting enjambment, the awkward effect of a second thought unfolding in real time and straight on to the machine.
today I feel a bit different: my prolog sounds phony & posed… (5)
This is a self-consciously experimental machine-made poem, which takes its shape by design from the amount of space physically available in the type- written role. But the movement from hand to machine was not linear or uni- versal or unconscious. Some writers in the immediate postwar period spoke of a soft migration from hand to machine, where the most privileged genres remained scripted long after business letters were being typed. Eliot had begun composing prose on the typewriter in 1916; in a letter to his Harvard friend, Conrad Aiken, he noted that the effect was rejuvenating, allowing him to start “sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon,” produc- ing instead a kind of writing that was “short, staccato, like modern French prose.”21 But, despite showing Pound The Waste Land in a draft that was, at least part, in typescript, he carried on composing his poetry by hand. He con- cluded the letter to Conrad Aiken, “The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.” Aiken himself described a similar process
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 10 Auden at Work of transition, “I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry,” and as late as 1981, Elizabeth Bishop said “I write prose on a typewriter. Not poetry.”22 Sylvia Plath typed up Ted Hughes’s poems to send them out to magazines, but she wrote her own out by hand. In her story, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”—an elliptical ars poetica—the narrator is also a typ- ist, but not a typist who writes on the typewriter. No, like Theodora Bosanquet at the very beginning of the twentieth century or, more obliquely, like the sinister, prying telegraphist in James’s novella “In the Cage,” this speaker is a mediator, someone who types up other people’s dreams. The words copying and copywork, words from scribal culture, often stand in for “typing up.”
Every day from nine to five I sit at my desk facing the door of the office and type up other people’s dreams. Not just dreams. That wouldn’t be practical enough for my bosses. I type up also people’s daytime com- plaints: trouble with mother, trouble with father, trouble with the bottle, the bed, the headache that bangs home and blacks out the sweet world for no known reason.23
I place Auden with this group, with those postwar writers for whom owning a typewriter did not mean using it to write poetry. In fact, the mid-century conservative position was suspicious of writers who had com- pletely stopped writing. This is the touched nerve in Capote’s criticism of On the Road, “it isn’t writing at all, just typing.”24 Jarrell made the same point in a famous one-sentence review of a forgettable book of poetry (by Oscar Williams): it “gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.”25 Here the criticism hardens around a common early twentieth-century metonymy. As Friedrich Kittler and others have discussed, not only the machine but the machinist (who was almost always a woman) was called a “typewriter,” and so Jarrell implies that the poems have been mechanically or quickly produced, and perhaps also that they are effeminate. Both Capote and Jarrell are worried about a particular kind of typing—not typing up, which is what Sylvia Plath’s narrator does, and what Theodora Bosanquet did for Henry James, and what—ironically—Plath herself did for Ted Hughes. Hughes continued to write by hand. In 1995, in one of the more interesting and thoughtful Paris Review interviews, he explained that he had reverted to writing poems in longhand to avoid some of the stylistic effects that machines seemed inevitably to produce: sentences that were “too long” and attenuated, as if the same amount of matter had become spread more thinly. In the 1950s and 1960s, drafting by hand and then typing up was seen as artisanal, slow, deliberate, and often retrospective; working straight on to the machine was fluid, spontaneous, improvisatory, and not necessarily selective.
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 “Still Doing It By Hand” 11
Many of the major modernist poets were primarily pre-publication revisers, leaving us thick dossiers of drafts, in manuscript and typescript, whose complexity far exceeds the post-publication revision history. But in Auden’s case, it is revision after a poem had first appeared in print that makes up most of its textual history: in drafting, he was rhetorical, sure- footed, even too convincing; it was only after publication that the slow process of reassessment and self-criticism that Paul Valéry calls “relecture tardive,” a belated, cold, self-distancing act of rereading, was to set in.26 How determinative should we regard these belated acts of revision, made to already published books, as being? Edward Mendelson, Auden’s executor and editor, takes Auden’s late acts of revision extremely seriously. His collected edition of Auden’s poems justifies itself by reference to the Greg- Bowers-Tanselle editorial doctrine of authorial “final intention,” although it should be noted that this principle was developed for Renaissance play texts and has never been widely followed by editors of twentieth-century poetry. Here is Mendelson’s editorial preface to the Collected Poems:
This edition includes all the poems that W. H. Auden wished to preserve, in a text that represents his final revisions … Fortunately, obligation and judgement are agreed in requiring that this first posthumous collected edition conform to its author’s wishes to the extent that they can be determined.27
There is a slightly peremptory glibness about that “fortunately”; we may think it finds resolution too quickly, for readers’ aesthetic judgment and their sense of ethical propriety are very often not allied. What if one judges the absent, excoriated “Spain, 1937” to be Auden’s “finest political poem”?28 Jerome McGann’s and George Bornstein’s recent work has advocated the value of “version theory” for readers of modernism, suggesting that the best way to approach texts published in alternate forms is to embrace their multiplicity. For Bornstein, recent version theory “offers a richer account of [texts] as processes rather than mere products of inscription,” allowing us to distinguish “current material texts from earlier existent or future possible ones.”29 It may be far-fetched to suggest that Mendelson’s mass-market edi- tion could reflect the range of Auden’s revisions in any substantial way, but it is important to realize that his final intentionalism has certain inevitable consequences: it effaces publication history, and consequently our sense of Auden as a poet who transformed over time; and it forces readers who are interested in textual process to look elsewhere. Whether or not we agree with Frank Gloversmith that Auden’s revisions actually damaged “the integ- rity of the work … the outcome is to remove the oeuvre from the realm of the social, the political, and the historical,” readers of many different kinds still seek access to the earlier versions of his work.30 Mendelson’s own English
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 12 Auden at Work
Auden was an invaluable companion to the Collected Poems, providing the texts of poems Auden subsequently retracted. Mendelson’s commitment to final intention is presented as a matter of editorial theory, but it is also a simple reflection of his taste. Readers of Auden may be divided in their opinion of the value of “early” and “late” style, but few would deny that there is a difference, even a “mystifying gap” between the two. In his influential piece “What’s Become of Wystan?” Philip Larkin was in no doubt about which poet he preferred: the first was “full of energetic unliterary knock-about and unique lucidity of phrase,” the second “too verbose to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving,” “unseri- ous” in attitude, with an uncomfortable “lisping archness” of manner.31 Larkin did not address Auden’s revisions, but we can assume that he would have taken a dim attitude towards the prospect of the old poet rewriting the younger. Mendelson, by contrast, is an advocate for late style. Adam Kirsch sums up the position concisely, “For the other camp—which includes Mr. Mendelson—Early Auden is still a genius, but Later Auden is an even big- ger genius,” before insinuating that there are personal investments at stake, “It’s appropriate that Mr. Mendelson should defend the Later Auden, since it was the Later Auden who in 1972 plucked him from the ranks of academia to be his literary executor. Mr. Mendelson, now a professor at Columbia University, is still best known for his work with Auden’s literary remains.”32 In his 1996 essay “Revision and Power,” Mendelson argues that revision functioned, in fact, as a form of negative dialectic for Auden: “when he revised his early drafts into publishable form and, later, when he revised his published works for new editions, he repeatedly rejected his most com- pelling metaphors, and called attention to his own artifice.”33 This elegant argument—Prospero using a rod to break his rod—leaves several questions unanswered. The logical problem it creates is one of regression, for is the compelling rejection of “compelling metaphors” not, in itself, a form of com- pulsion? Mendelson’s uncritical attitude toward Auden’s own self-lacerating, but highly rhetorical, repudiation of rhetoric is, I think, more troubling than his personal relationship to the poet. In his doctrinaire acts of revision and controlling rearrangements of his work for collected and selected editions, did Auden ever, really, give up trying to compel his readers? Eliot once said that his own criticism was “a by-product of my private poetry-workshop,” and hence intrinsically partial, limited, and self-referential, “What has no relation to the poet’s own work, or what is antipathetic to him, is outside of his competence.”34 In The Dyer’s Hand, Auden made much the same point, “I am always interested in hearing what a poet has to say about the nature of poetry, though I do not take it too seriously. As objective statements, his definitions are never accurate, never complete and always one-sided. Not one would stand up under a rigorous analysis.”35 If poets are not to be taken too seriously when they talk about poetry, perhaps we should also be wary of taking their isolated editorial decisions—inevitably made at a single
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 “Still Doing It By Hand” 13 moment, and not over the longue durée of a career—as all-encompassing or necessarily “final” intentions. Mendelson’s commitment to the later Auden produces a dyadic model of revision, in which the older, wiser poet corrects and emends the sins of the younger, replacing political urgency with Horatian quietude, and riddling obscurity with a graceful plain style. What, if anything, might this have to do with Auden’s method of production? Did he perhaps write too fast, even too mechanically, at the beginning? The Berg notebook of poems from May 1927 to March 1929, published in facsimile by Patrick T. Lawlor, lists 109 lyrics in its index, of which just over one-third were published by Auden. So we see a production rate, in this notebook alone, of about one poem every three weeks. This number would be higher if we count some of the lines excerpted from poems or collections that were, by and large, not to make it into print. On page 158 of the notebook, for example, we have a collection of mostly unpublished “Shorts,” but this jumble includes the lines “The friends of the born nurse / Are always falling ill” which was to be revised and published, with a wittily rhyming second line “Are always getting worse.”36 Here there are also four lines which seem to be camping Eliot’s early poem “Aunt Helen,” where the footman sits “Holding the second housemaid on his knees— / Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.” Auden wrote:
In the local the married Englishman With the chauffeur on his knee Said “I hear the parties in Cambridge Are hot stuff nowadays.”
The rate of production may not be slow, but it doesn’t suggest mindless or mechanical facility either. There is plenty of crossing out and second think- ing in the notebook. For many modernist writers, a manuscript became a kind of sourcebook to mine during a secondary process of typing out, rethinking, and revising. Pound’s “Bad but cant attack until I get typescript” shows the beginnings of a prejudice—justified in Eliot’s case—that manu- script never represents something approaching a final version. For Auden, however, typing seems to have been less important as a compositional stage than it was for either Eliot or Pound. The actual material evidence shows a poet who, at least at this point, remained highly committed to the hand. In her edition of the Juvenilia Katherine Bucknell prints a version of the Hopkinesque “Bones wrenched, weak whimper” that Auden enclosed in typescript with manuscript corrections in a letter to Christopher Isherwood, and she notes that the same text also survives in a fair-copy manuscript made for John Pudney. She describes it as “the earliest piece by Auden to survive virtually intact in his mature published work” and notes, in her edition, that “he revised it for Poems (1928).”37 But when we look at the version that was published in 1928, we find that it is closer to the final manuscript/
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 14 Auden at Work notebook poem than it is to the typescript document. So, for example, the typescript contains three lines (lines 4–6):
Eased by mucous tenderness, to absorb the word Which was before began; flesh-dough suffills to spilling Concave of spirit—so you here I have: but gone (191)
In the notebook these lines are also present, but they have already been removed: both bracketed off with square brackets and struck-through with three long wavy lines. What kind of genetic detective work does this allow us to do? Someone unfamiliar with the use of the typewriter at this cultural moment might assume, from the surviving evidence, that Auden went about typing the poem first, for his letter, before copying it back into the manuscript notebook, and only then changing his mind about lines 4–6. But Auden seems never to have begun a poem on the typewriter. A second possibility, which Bucknell pursues, is that the typescript was altered by hand “to correct mistyped words that are difficult to read in P(B) rather than slips of the finger” and that it was “prepared from the Pudney fair copy [i.e. the document in the Berg collection] by a typist” (192). In other words, she suggests that the genetic order begins with the Pudney copy, proceeds to the typescript made for Isherwood, and then proceeds again, with revision, to the first published text (1928). But it looks to me as if most of the working out of the poem happened in manuscript. For exam- ple, the middle line in the notebook contains the unusual verb “suffills” as the base line of text, but has then been revised in superscript to “fills up” before being deleted. The third line of the notebook is also closer to the published 1928 version than the typescript is. The typescript reads “Rank presence-smell a rich mould augurs for roots urged,” and the base text in the notebook has this too, before being amended to the correct version, “Presence a rich mould augured for roots urged, but gone.” The change of tense in the verb from “augurs” to “augured” is clearly visible, as is the crossing out of “Rank presence-smell” and the insertion of a capitalized “Presence.” In other words, it seems that Auden began writing the poem in this notebook by hand (because the notebook contains the earliest stage of genetic documentation), but that he also continued working on it here until he got it into a state where it was publishable. Not only was he not, in this case, composing directly on the typewriter, as O’Hara and Ginsberg tried to do; he was not even using typescript in the way that Eliot or Pound do, as a self-sufficient and important stage in a public or shared revision process. In fact, it might have been partly because of Auden’s fierce commitment to private revision—to getting a poem to work as much like a machine as possible—that, counterintuitively, he wanted to stick with the pen. Allen Ginsberg tells us that he pasted Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 “Still Doing It By Hand” 15
Prose” above his desk when he wanted to give up “this laborious and dreary lying called craft and revision.”
Not “selectivity” of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement….38
And note that to produce this blowsy, anaphoric, additive style, Kerouac recommended composing in a trance-like state and straight on to the type- writer. Perhaps it was partly because Auden wanted to continue cultivating both the dreariness and the laboriousness of revision that he preferred doing things by hand. Asked in his Paris Review interview, “Isn’t there some truth to be had from the knowledge that a poet does quite literally start in the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart?” he replied tartly, “It may be neces- sary for him to start there, but there is no reason for others to pay it a visit. Here I like the quote of Valéry, which says that when people don’t know anything else they take their clothes off.” He saw the typewriter as being useful only as a tool for defamiliarizing something. In his essay “Writing,” he claims, “Much as I loathe the typewriter, I must admit that it is a help in self-criticism. Typescript is so impersonal and hideous to look at that, if I type out a poem, I immediately see defects which I missed when I looked through it in manuscript.”39 But he felt that longhand could perform the same function, in a different context, and goes on to note that the “severest test” of someone else’s work is to copy it from type into longhand, a process that would again ensure that “the slightest defect will reveal itself” (17). Auden’s practice remained remarkably unchanged over the course of his career. As Humphrey Carpenter has shown, his compositional habits did not shift significantly between the 1920s and 1970s: he wrote on the right-hand page of a notebook, made revisions on the verso, typed up a fair copy, revised this before magazine or first book publication, and often, notoriously, again before later book publications.40 There is no evidence that he ever used the typewriter as a tool for first-draft composition: it remained, in an increas- ingly conservative way, a tool for making fair copies. One simple measure of the degree of his preference for the artisanal over the machine: the Berg collection at New York, which has the largest single collection of Auden’s manuscripts and typescripts, contains, in its detailed container list, more than 800 uses of the word “holograph” to describe individual items (mostly individual poems) and fewer than 200 occurrences of “typescript draft.” The majority of typewritten items are grouped with their holograph versions, so they are obviously remediations of poems that were drafted by hand. But even the term “typewritten draft” does not seem to represent a true draft. Most of the items labeled like this can also be found in the holograph
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 16 Auden at Work notebooks that Auden continued to keep until the end of his life. For example, the item “holograph notebook [1969–70]” contains, among other things, drafts of “Epistle to a Godson,” “The Art of Healing,” “A New Year Greeting,” “Heard and Seen,” “Moon Landing,” “The Garrison,” “Doggerel By A Senior Citizen”—that is, most of the poems from Auden’s final years that made it into the Collected Poems.41 Given the weight of this evidence, it is actually hard to assume that Auden ever wrote any poem directly on to the machine; because we have handwritten holographs for the vast major- ity, when one isn’t available to us, it seems more plausible to assume that the manuscript for this particular item has simply not been preserved than that Auden had changed his habits of a lifetime. The Berg archive shows a slightly higher percentage of typescript prose articles and reviews that lack a holograph first version. But, once again, it is hard to distinguish missing genetic evidence from an actual compositional act. And his habit of post- publication revision began as soon as he started publishing. His early readers recognized this propensity for self-alteration, and sometimes criticized him for it. In his 1936 review of Look Stranger!, Alex Glendinning found to his surprise that “One poem appeared in 1933 with the title ‘A Communist To Others’: but in the present untitled version the word ‘comrade’ has been altered to ‘brothers’; and in another poem, which first appeared at the same time, ‘communist orator’ has been altered to ‘political orator’.”42 Unlike Auden’s later critics, Glendinning did not read the removal of references to communism as of particular ideological significance; his tone is one of gen- tle puzzlement: “In considering the book as a whole, we are not hampered by such problems of belief or political allegiance as seemed to complicate the work of the younger poets a few years ago.”43 Auden’s decision not to write poetry on a typewriter, like that of Elizabeth Bishop or Sylvia Plath, cannot be understood simply as technophobia. I want to suggest instead that this technologically conservative choice was part of a more complex aesthetic decision—linked to his interest in certain kinds of involuted syntax, to retroactive, revisionary temporal structures, and to a mastery of traditional forms. He was anti-spontaneity, anti-Romantic, a poet who used notebooks simply to list rhymes, and who used revision to perfect form, even when the poems were not necessarily serious. Mendelson’s dis- cussion of Auden’s revisions privileges those that are “serious,” concerned with ethics, truth, and the abolition of rhetoric. Auden himself certainly had a lot to say about this kind of revision. When he was asked for permission to include “September 1, 1939” and “Spain 1937” in a 1964 anthology, Poetry of the Thirties, he agreed, but only on one condition: the editor must make it clear that “Mr. W. H. Auden considers [these poems] to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”44 He often spoke of revision in terms of shame and atonement, explaining in his 1966 foreword that “some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring.”45 In fact, as he grew older, he
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 “Still Doing It By Hand” 17 seemed to find a basic tension between the virtuosic and the veridical, both in his own work and that of others: to be too good meant not telling the truth. In 1964, he wrote a letter to Stephen Spender dismissing Yeats, who had “become for me a symbol of my own devil of unauthenticity … false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities … His [poems] make me whore after lies.”46 But there is an equally important second category of revision that is concerned purely with sound. Mendelson seems unable to approve of this change, aimed at removing the voiced “s” from a rhyming pair:
Abandoned by his general and his lice, Under a padded quilt he closed his eyes. (1938) /Under a padded quilt he turned to ice. (1966)
He comments that “the new version corrected the rhyme but sacrificed the plain truth that Auden always demanded when he wrote about the art of poetry.”47 But in fact many of Auden’s revisions are like this: fussy, aes- thetic, and sonically driven. When he said that “No woman is an aesthete. No woman ever wrote nonsense verse,” he equated being an aesthete not with any particular kind of taste—but with consummate stylistic mastery.48 Mendelson approves, in other words, of the revisions that Auden made for ethical reasons, even when these were drastic and included removing entire poems from the collected oeuvre, but seems much less convinced of the revisions made for aesthetic or technical/prosodic reasons, which are often tiny lexical substitutions. But it is important to realize that—however much coverage Auden’s self-lacerating tirades against his own “dishonesty” or “trash” might have garnered—the majority of his energy in revision was devoted to revision of the second kind, scrupulous local change. In this respect, his practice looks quite different from the more comprehensive slash-and-burn approach taken to early drafts by some of the high modern- ist poets, most notably Eliot and Pound.49 Nothing could be more different from the neoromantic spontaneity of O’Hara or the technological facility of Ammons than the studied camp of a poem such as “The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning,” which begins in heroic couplets.
By all means sing of love but, if you do, Please make a rare old proper hullabaloo: When ladies ask How much do you love me? The Christian answer is così-così…50
The poem continues to imagine a poet self-censoring his work under a new government, by resexing the pronouns, and modifying phrases within their rhyming structure from, for example, “lily-breasted” to “lion-chested”; as in Pope’s Essay on Criticism, the wit comes partly from the smooth incorpora- tion of the examples into the poem’s own form.
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 18 Auden at Work
Auden’s syllabic poems, which are not full of these kinds of pirouetting pleasures, have tended to baffle; Bloom talks of their conjunction of the prosaic and the ordinary, via a “modulated randomness of prose rhythms.”51 But I think we can understand them as part of the same, classicizing project. They reject the pleasure of mastery of rhyme in favor of mastering a difficult but unpleasing alternative form. In this sense they are ascetic. And deadly serious. Take “The Horatians,” for example, which Helen Vendler picks out in her review of City Without Walls as “strange coming from the inhabitant not of Barchester but of the East Village.”52 It is certainly not about the time or place in which it was written. Unlike O’Hara in his lunch poems or even Ginsberg in the more vatic Howl (another typewritten poem), Auden is not concerned with writing about beer at Fugazzi’s, or characters who cruised Harlem scoring junk, or fell out of subway trains.53 But Vendler is perhaps wrong to equate Auden’s Horatianism immediately with the provincialism of Victorian England, and wrong, certainly, to claim that Auden himself was never foudroyant. In the Another Time sonnet “The Novelist,” Auden works in the same metaphoric field when he describes the novelist as plain, dull, and responsible, and poets as “encased in talent like a uniform,” able to “dash forward like hussars,” or “amaze us like a thunderstorm.” Is the problem not rather that, until late in his career, the temptation to be flashy, rhetorical, and celebrated was too strong? This late, sober poem aims at Classicism in several senses and, I think, is no less studied in its deliberate equanimity than Ammons or Ginsberg are with their machine-driven spontaneity. First, “The Horatians” attempts to imitate Horace’s lyric meters by a careful counting-out of syllables per line; second, it takes a cold eye, sub specie aeternitatis, on contemporary life, and third, it situates itself with respect to Eliot’s use of the word. For Eliot, Classicism was a stick, and he used it to beat Romanticism, the inner voice, and “mystical inspiration.” In his lectures The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, he argues that “the faith in mystical inspiration”—another version of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose—“is responsible for the exaggerated repute of Kubla Khan,” for “organization is necessary as well as ‘inspiration,’” a word marked off with pincer-like quotation marks. Auden agreed; he thought Coleridge’s account of its composition a “fib.” The Horatian poetry he produced in the 1960s chastens itself into a verbal flatness, achieving a sober and weary sense of its place in the world. It is not inspired and it is not spontaneous. Indeed, like Horace, who recommended keeping everything one wrote in a drawer for nine years until its defects could be seen clearly, Auden commends “amending” as a cure for overween- ing and rhetorical writing, unaware of its limitations and lack of stature. Auden’s poem also recapitulates, in its slightly stilted command to “look at this world with a happy eye,” one of Horace’s most famous principles, aequam memento rebus in arduis/ servare mentem. This phrase from Odes II.iii
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 “Still Doing It By Hand” 19 was rendered slightly more easily into English by Kipling: it is the principle of keeping your head.54
Some of you have written poems, usually short ones, and some kept diaries, seldom published till after your deaths, but most make no memorable impact
except on your friends and dogs. Enthusiastic Youth writes you off as cold, who cannot be found on barricades, and never shoot either yourselves or your lovers.
You thought well of your Odes, Flaccus, and believed they would live, but knew, and have taught your descendants to say with you: ‘As makers go, compared with Pindar or any
of the great foudroyant masters who don’t ever amend, we are, for all our polish, of little stature, and, as human lives, compared with authentic martyrs
like Regulus, of no account. We can only do what it seems to us we were made for, look at this world with a happy eye but from a sober perspective.’
But these poems are not politically evasive, obscurely private or, as Ginsberg has it, mind-wandering. They are unpleasant, in the sense of “the unpleas- antness of great poetry,” and they are rebarbatively, not laxly, quietist.55 The syllabic form is used to great effect here. In English it is not particularly easy to write syllabic poems, and yet the form fails to produce any of the simple mnemonic power of rhyme and accentual-syllabic rhythm; it is, in a sense, form for its own sake, a straightjacket for the writer that offers no corresponding pleasure for the reader. Auden had begun using syllabics for the solemn Freud elegy, with its weighty consciousness of not only an individual’s death but an era’s, but seemed to become more fond of them for his final collections. I think this preference can, in itself, be understood medially, as part of his continued commitment to handwritten poetry. Not only does the form have a series of austere classical antecedents, but it produces something grave and pendulous about the movement of the end of the line, having neither the predictability
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 20 Auden at Work
(and potential monotony) of traditional rhymed stanza forms (where “night” so often sets up “light,” “air” “hair,” and so on), nor the unhesitating light- ness that some typewritten poems from this period seem to experiment with. In his machine-made poem, Ammons repeatedly ends lines with a light type- writer ampersand (traditional rhyming poetry rarely even ends lines with an “and), and “@” key, a modern abbreviation in parenthesis, “revolutions per foot (rpf),” or simply writes one-word lines. O’Hara, also typing directly on to the machine, is fond of the slightly maladroit, sometimes witty, break in sense across lines, like the separation between verb and preposition in “Quick! a last poem before I go/ off my rocker. O Rachmaninoff!” (11). One traditional difference between poetry and prose is that in poetry, line breaks are compositional and not merely compositorial. But the first generation of composer-compositors seems interested in exploring and play- ing with some of the more random constraints that type can impose on the human mind and the human voice. In “Rhapsody,” we see O’Hara type out a phrase which seems like a single printed unit, “515 Madison Avenue”—a standalone address—before, in the next line, posing the question which, syntactically, is part of the same thought, “door to heaven? portal” (37). In Auden’s late poems, drafted by hand, and revised by hand, before being typed up, we see a completely different, in fact countervailing, approach to managing the line ending. In poems written in traditional rhyming struc- tures, the rhyme (including Auden’s own strict rules, e.g. around voiced and unvoiced “s”s) dramatically reduces the freedom allowed at line endings. But in the syllabic poems, where lines often end with disyllabic words that would traditionally have produced “feminine” rhymes, the effect is more calculated and more ponderous. Take, for example, the 1969 poem “Moon Landing,” which addresses an entirely up-to-date, even futuristic event, with a chas- tened world-weariness borrowed, again, from Horace, and in stanzas formed on syllable count (11-11-9-10). Even the fact that the poem is “occasional” is significant. It is not written out of some sudden and private lyric impulse (O’Hara’s “quick!”), but with measured impersonality, in response to a politically calculated and completely unspontaneous national event. It is also rather deliberately unprovincial, using a much more complicated and vari- ous lexis than any of O’Hara’s or Ginsberg’s poems and insisting that we look outside the here and now of contemporary America—to Freud’s ideas about the phallus, to Hector and ancient models of combat, to Auden’s Austrian life, and to a moon that “still queens the Heavens / as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at.” In the final stanza, a lordly act of transhistorical survey turns into a modest, peculiar, and again Horatian, entreaty to “blithe it.”
Our apparatniks will continue making the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for is that artists, chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.56
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 “Still Doing It By Hand” 21
This is polemical, to be sure, and experimental, in its own way; but its polemic is entirely the opposite of Pound’s enthusiasm, some decades ear- lier, for making it new. For Auden in the 1950s and 1960s, continuing to write by hand had become a way of fashioning a classical, formalist, late modernist poetry, always subject to revisionary improvement, hankering (after Horace) to stay nine years in a drawer. The oddness of this not always likeable poetry, with its chaste calls for equanimity, and its refusal of rheto- ric, of sound-bites, of fun, comes partly from the difference it measures out between itself and the American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. Auden’s insistence on writing about the moon landing by hand is part of this strate- gic conservatism. He noted:
In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been intro- duced into the mental kitchen—alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc.,—but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything still has to be done by hand.57
Notes
1. Randall Jarrell, Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, ed. Stephen Burt and Hannah Brooks-Motl (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 20. 2. Randall Jarrell, “On a Limited Success,” April 12, 1942, The Nation, reprinted in John Haffenden ed., W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1983), 314. 3. Delmore Schwartz on Auden’s “Most Self-Indulgent Book,” The Partisan Review xiv, September–October 1947, 528–31, reprinted in John Haffenden ed., W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1983), 368–71. 4. Graham Greene, “Three Poets,” Oxford Magazine, 10 November 1932. Reprinted in John Haffenden ed., W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1983), 115–116, 115. 5. A backhanded compliment, because in “For the Time Being” these problems are said to be less evident. The blurb is cited by John Haffenden in his introduction to W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage, 42. 6. The first two appraisals were made by Roger Kimball, “The Permanent Auden,” The New Criterion, 17.9 (May 1999): 13; the second is from Alan Jacobs, What Became of Wystan (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998), 101. 7. Clive James, At the Pillars of Hercules (London: Picador, 1998), 18. 8. W. H. Auden, “The Prophets,” Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 203. 9. W. H. Auden, “Writing,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, first published in 1962 (New York: Vintage, 1968), 13–27, 17. 10. William Burroughs, “Technology of Writing,” in The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (London: John Calder, 1985), 32–7, 37. 11. Marshall McLuhan, “The Typewriter: Into the Age of Iron Whim,” from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, Kegan, Paul, 1964), 258–74, 260.
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 22 Auden at Work
12. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 203. 13. Marshall McLuhan, “The Typewriter: Into the Age of Iron Whim,” 260. 14. Joe LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), xiv. 15. A passage added in the errata some two decades after the original publication of “The Eolian Harp,” see Nicholas Halmi ed., Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 2004), 18. 16. Frank O’Hara, “Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” Lunch Poems, Pocket Poets Series (San Francisco: City Lights Bookstore, 1964), 29. 17. Frank O’Hara, “For the Chinese New Year & For Bill Berkson,” Lunch Poems, 64–69, 69. 18. Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 130. 19. Helen Vendler, “The Virtues of the Alterable,” Rev. of Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems in Parnassus Review, 1.1 (1972),
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 “Still Doing It By Hand” 23
35. W. H. Auden, “Making, Knowing, Judging,” in The Dyer’s Hand (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 31–60, 52. 36. “Shorts,” Collected Poems, 55. 37. W. H. Auden, Juvenilia: Poems 1922–1928, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 192. 38. Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Evergreen Review 2.5 (1958): 72–3. 39. W. H. Auden, “Writing,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1968), 13–27, 17. 40. Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 341. 41. Other poems, including “The Aliens,” are included in a notebook that was apparently kept alongside this one, for a longer period of time, and which is labeled “Holograph notebook 1965–[73].” See http://archives.nypl.org/ brg/19132#detailed. 42. Alex Glendinning, “Mr. Auden’s Problems in Poetry,” rev. of Look, Stranger! Times Literary Supplement, Saturday November 28, 1936, 991. 43. Ibid. 44. See Robin Skelton, Poetry of the Thirties (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 41. 45. Reprinted in Collected Poems, 15. 46. See Stan Smith, “Persuasions to Rejoice: Auden’s Oedipal Dialogues with W. B. Yeats,” W. H. Auden: ‘The Language of Leaning and the Language of Love’: Uncollected Writings, New Interpretations, ed. Katharine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 155–63, 155. 47. Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 477. 48. Newman, Michael. “Interview: W. H. Auden, The Art of Poetry No. 17.” Paris Review 57 (Spring 1974): 32–69. 49. For a comprehensive discussion of high modernism’s propensity to structural, rather than lexical or local, transformation during the genetic process, see Hannah Sullivan, The Work of Revision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), passim. 50. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, 470. 51. Robert Bloom is quoted by R. Victoria Arana, W. H. Auden’s Poetry: Mythos, Theory, and Practice (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2009), 199. 52. Helen Vendler, review of City Without Walls, New York Times Book Review, Feb. 22 1970, republished in Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 91–5, 92. 53. In the facsimile edition of Howl published in 1986, Ginsberg annotates this carefully, nostalgically, with reference back to a now that has, of course, vanished, “Fugazzi’s Sixth Avenue Greenwich Village bar was an early 1950s alternative to the noisier San Remo nearby,” Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by the Author with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts, and Bibliography (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). 54. Rudyard Kipling, “If,” Rewards and Fairies (London: Macmillan, 1910), 175–6. 55. T. S. Eliot’s ringing formulation in the “Blake” essay, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 137–43, 137. 56. Auden, “Moon Landing,” Collected Poems, 632–3. 57. W. H. Auden, “Writing,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, 13–27, 17.
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4
Index
Abbot, Berenice, 102–3, 105 Dance of Death, The (with Aiken, Conrad, 9 Christopher Isherwood, play), 74, Alvarez, A., 237–8, 240 75–6, 78 Ammons, A. R., 8–9, 17, 18, 19 Delia (libretto), 111, 117, 120, 126 Arendt, Hannah, 132, 231, 242 “Dethroned,” 285 Auden, W. H. “Dichtung and Wahrheit,” 194 “Academic Graffiti,” 194 Dog Beneath the Skin, The (with adaptation of Webster’s The Duchess Christopher Isherwood, play), of Malfi (with Bertolt Brecht), 252 73–4, 78–9, 286 adaptation of Brecht’s Caucasian “Doggerel by a Senior Citizen,” 16, Chalk Circle (with James and Tania 277 Stern), 252–3 Double Man, The (1941), 40 Age of Anxiety, The (1947), 4, 70, 83, Dyer’s Hand, The, 12, 173, 192–3, 275, 241, 250–2, 256–9, 265, 267–70, 278, 283 286–8 Elegy for Young Lovers (libretto), 111, “Air Port,” 233 117, 120–4, 125–6, 128 “Amor Loci,” 286, 289 Enchaféd Flood, The (1950), 42, 163 Another Time (1940), 18, 25, 38–9 Enemies of a Bishop, The (with Ascent of F6, The (play), 72, 80–2 Christopher Isherwood, play), 72, “Atlantis,” 133–53 77, 78 “Art of Healing, The,” 16 “Engine House, The” 285 “At the Grave of Henry James,” 99, “Epistle to a Godson,” 16 244 “Epithalamion,” 30–1, 39 “Augustus to Augustine” (prose), 157, “Evolution of the Dragon, The” 285 160 “Fall of Rome, The,” 157, 161–4, 166, “Balaam and his Ass” (prose), 193, 169–76, 244, 279 198, 204 For the Time Being: A Christmas Beside the Seaside (film), 53, 61–62 Oratorio (1944), 5, 70, 83, 156, 157, “Bones wrenched, weak whimper,” 159–60, 161, 181 13 “From scars where kestrels hover,” 285 “Bucolics,” 241 “Future of English Poetic Drama, “Cattivo Tempo,” 232, 243–4, 245–8 The” (lecture), 64 “Cave of Making, The” 288 “Garrison, The,” 16 Certain World, A (1971), 193, 281–2, “Genesis of a Libretto” (with Chester 285 Kallman, prose), 121 “Christmas 1940,” 139 Hadrian’s Wall (play, 1937), 157–9 City Without Walls (1969), 18 “Heard and Seen,” 16 Coal Face (film), 57, 67, 91 “Horae Canonicae,” 240, 241 Collected Poems, 11, 12, 16, 286 “Horatians, The,” 18 Collected Poetry (1945), 74, 133, 139 “I Am Not a Camera,” 94 Collected Shorter Poems (1966), 135 “I chose this lean country,” 285 “Creation of Art and Poetry, The” “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” 19, (prose), 193 254
305
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 306 Index
Auden, W. H. – continued “Not in Baedeker,” 287 “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 145 “Notes on the Ethical and the “In Praise of Limestone,” 233, 244, Aesthetic” (prose), 142 247, 286 “New Year Greeting, A,” 16, 224 “In Schrafft’s,” 232, 233–5, 238, 239, On the Frontier (with Christopher 240, 242, 247 Isherwood, play), 81–2 “In Sickness and in Health,” 185 Orators, The (1932), 5, 33, 45, 74–5, “In Time of War,” 94, 96, 99; see also 83, 149, 194, 216, 219–29 “Sonnets from China” “Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed,” 280 Introduction to The Poet’s Tongue, 203 Paid on Both Sides (1930), 71–2, 73, “Joker in the Pack, The” (prose), 193, 75, 78, 81 204 Paul Bunyan (operetta), 82, 136 “Josef Weinheber,” 288 Plays and Dramatic Works, 71 Journey to a War (with Christopher Poems (1928), 13 Isherwood), 25, 86, 87, 93–5, 96–8, “Poet and the City, The” (prose), 194, 136, 154, 253 283 Juvenilia: Poems 1922–1928 (1994), 13 “Poet of the Encirclement, The” “Kairos and Logos,” 140, 142 (prose), 167–9 “L’Homme d’Esprit” (prose), 191, “Poetry and Film” (lecture), 49, 193, 197, 199, 203, 204 59–61, 93 “Landfall,” 265, 274 “Prime,” 233 “Leap Before You Look,” 142 “Prolific and the Devourer, The” “Letter to Lord Byron,” 64, 107, 194, (prose), 278, 280 238, 280 “Quest, The,” 133, 142, 143 Letters from Iceland (with Louis “Quest in Modern Literature, The” MacNeice), 25, 52, 64–65, 86, 87, 88, (lectures), 252 90, 91–3, 94, 95, 98, 100, 253 Rake’s Progress, The (libretto), 82, “Liberal Fascist, The,” 217 84, 111, 112, 113, 115, 117–20, Life of an American, The (film), 50–51 124 Look Stranger! (1936), 16, 279 “Refugee Blues,” 38 “Making, Judging, Knowing” (prose), Review of Documentary Film, 49–50, 192–3, 194, 202 58–59 “Marginalia,” 276 “Rimbaud,” 191 “Marriage of True Minds, A” (prose), “Roman Wall Blues,” 158–9 111, 116–7 Sea and the Mirror, The (1944), 3, 70, “Memorial for the City,” 174–5, 233, 179–89, 241, 281 244, 265 Secondary Worlds (1968), 282 “Metropolis,” 265–70, 274 “September 1, 1939,” 1, 16, 26, 35–7, “Montaigne,” 191 267 “Moon Landing,” 16, 20 “Shield of Achilles, The,” 247 “Musée des Beaux Arts,” 31, 38 “Shorts II,” 13 Negroes (film), 80 “Some Reflections on Opera as a New Year Letter (1940), 5, 238, 278, Medium” (prose), 125 279, 283 “Sonnets from China,” 94, 99; see “New Year Letter,” 25, 32, 40–5, 140, also “In Time of War” 162, 194, 286 “Spain, 1937,” 11, 16, 22 Night Mail (film), 57–8, 91, 277 “Spinster’s Song,” 265, 274 Nones (1951), 232, 233, 234, “Talking to Myself,” 224 239–40, 247 “Thanksgiving for a Habitat,” 241 “Noon,” 265, 274 “This Lunar Beauty,” 205, 209–12
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Index 307
“Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning, Burt, Stephen, 220 The,” 17 “Two Bestiaries” (prose), 173 Capa, Robert, 95 “Under Sirius,” 244 Capote, Truman, 10 “Under Which Lyre,” 232, 236, 238–9, Carlson, Matthew Paul, 116, 121 247, 265 Carpenter, Humphrey, 15, 58, 116 “Unknown Citizen, The” 264 Carritt, Gabriel, 224, 226, 229 “Virgin and the Dynamo, The” Carter, John, 101–2 (prose), 201 Cavafy, Constantine P., 137, 139–43, “Vocation and Society” (prose), 111, 145, 147, 148, 151, 152 284 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 55–56, 57 “Voltaire,” 191 Chekhov, Anton, 33 “Voltaire at Ferney,” 38–9 CIA, 242–3, 245, 246 “Wandering Jew, The” (prose), 151 Cochrane, Charles Norris, 160–1, 170, 171 “Watershed, The” 280–1, 282, Coldstream, William, 52, 89–90, 91 286 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 8, 18 Way to the Sea, The (film), 50, 53, Conniff, Brian, 240 59–60, 62–64 Connolly, Cyril, 171–2, 244, 246 “W. H. Auden, The Art of Poetry, Craft, Robert, 111, 113 No. 17” (interview in Paris Review), 15 Dante Alighieri, 40, 80, 127, 132, 184 “Work, Carnival and Prayer” (prose), Davenport-Hines, Richard, 223, 224 276, 288–9 Davis, George, 135, 136 “Writing” (prose), 111, 115, 196, 281, Dawkins, R. M., 141 282 Day-Lewis, Cecil, 153, 217, 218–9 Augustine, St, 147, 157, 160, 182 Deppman, Jed, et al Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant- Bacon, Francis, 138 Textes, 4 Badenhausen, Richard, 87, 113, 128 Dickinson, Emily, 236 Barzun, Jacques, 231, 249 Dodds, E. R., 26, 277 Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 69, 157, 159, Downs School, 136 161–6, 173, 176, 186, 191 Benét, William Rose, 168, 169 Eisenstein, S. M., 54 Benjamin, Jessica, 127–8 Eliot, T. S., 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, Bennett, Alan, 70–1 63, 71–2, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 113, Berlin, Isaiah, 243, 247 128, 141, 157, 161, 163–4, 165, 166, Bishop, Elizabeth, 10, 16, 233 167, 173, 184, 222, 231, 245, 275, Bogan, Louise, 243, 244, 246, 248, 277 249 “Aunt Helen,” 13 Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, 30 Murder in the Cathedral, 77 Bornstein, George, 11 Sweeney Agonistes, 8, 76 Bosanquet, Theodora, 6, 10 The Waste Land, 6, 9, 74, 165, 167 Bowles, Jane, 136 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Bowles, Paul, 136 Criticism, 18 Brant, Sebastian, 139 Brecht, Bertolt, 32, 76, 252–3 Farnam, Dorothy J., 152 Britten, Benjamin, 3, 37, 50, 57–8, 68, February House, 84, 135–8, 152, 155 70, 82, 135, 136, 137 Filreis, Alan, 242–3, 244, 246, 249 Bryant, Marsha, 52, 108, 272 Fleming, Peter, 95 Burroughs, William, 6 Forster, E. M., 141
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 308 Index
Freud, Sigmund, 20, 172, Joyce, James, 7, 51 Fuller, John, 139, 141, 220, 285 Kafka, Franz, 34, 151 Ginsberg, Allen, 8, 14, 18, 19, 20, 23 Kallman, Chester, 3, 26, 27, 37, 70, 82, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 34, 40, 111–8, 121, 123, 124, 125–6, 128–9, 141, 148, 185, 198, 282 137–8, 142, 144, 151, 152 Gibbon, Edward, 160, 172 Kenner, Hugh, 7 Gottlieb, Susannah Young-Ah, 117, 132, Kerouac, Jack, 8, 14–5, 18 251, 270, 271 Kierkegaard, Søren, 82–3, 133, 135, GPO Film Unit, 86, 89, 91 141–2, 143, 145, 146, 148, 159–60, Greene, Graham, 5, 217 161, 162, 192, 279 Grierson, John, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55, Kipling, Rudyard, 3, 19, 157, 167–9, 170 56–57, 86, 90, 101 Kirstein, Lincoln, 101 Drifters, 90–2 Kittler, Friedrich, 7, 10 Grigson, Geoffrey, 6 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 126 Group Theatre, 3, 75, 81 Gypsy Rose Lee (Rose Louise Hovick), Lane, Homer, 72, 73 136, 147 Larkin, Philip, 12 Lawrence, D. H., 34, 191, 193, 198, 220 Hardy, Thomas, 233, 284 Lawrence, T. E., 33 Heaney, Seamus, 231–2 Layard, John, 72 Hecht, Anthony, 232, 238 Leavis, F. R., 219 Hegel, G. W. F., 142, 149 Henze, Hans Werner, 111, 123, 125, 128 Macdonald, Dwight, 244–6, 247 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 111, 116–7, MacNeice, Louis, 3, 25, 87, 88, 91, 276, 120, 126 279, 288 Hollander, John, 232, 238 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 191–2, 194–5 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 224, 228, 229 Mann, Elizabeth, 30 Horace, Quintus Flaccus, 18, 20, 21, 238 Mann, Erika, 88, 137 Housman, A. E., 38 Mann, Golo, 135, 136, 137 Hughes, Ted, 10 Mann, Klaus, 137 Hynes, Samuel, 218 Mann, Thomas, 136, 192 Marx, Karl, 75, 226–7, 228 Ibsen, Henrik, 79, 151 Mason, David, 140 Isherwood, Christopher, 3, 25, 50, 51, McCullers, Carson, 136 70, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79–80, 82, 87, McLuhan, Marshall, 6, 7–8 93–6, 99, 100, 112, 162, 220, 276, Medley, Robert, 76, 79 286 Mendelson, Edward, 3, 11–13, 16, 17, 71, Ivens, Joris, 55, 95 78, 99, 112, 116, 133, 140, 142, 188, 220, 222, 226, 251, 265 Jacobs, Alan, 251 Merrill, James, 232 James, Henry, 7, 10, 26, 86, 87, Mitchell, Joseph, 235 99–106, 108, 109, 163, 189, Mitchison, Naomi, 220, 278 197, 250 Morgan-Brown, Cyril, 220 American Scene, The, 86–7, 99–106, 109, 250, 253–5, 256, 259, 264 Nabokov, Nicolas, 243, 245, 264, Jarrell, Randall, 5, 10, 69, 77, 231, Nash, Ogden, 26 237–40, 271 Nemerov, Howard, 232, 238 John-Steiner, Vera, 114 New Criticism, 231–2, 235, 236 Johnson, Samuel, 3 Newton, Caroline, 138, 141, 152
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Index 309
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 231, 240–2, 243, Stern, James, 251–3, 255–60, 264, 265, 247 270, 276, 277 Niebuhr, Ursula, 240 Hidden Damage, The, 252, 255–60, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 159, 162 264, 265 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 35, 277 Stieglitz, Alfred, 102–3, 104, 110 Nuttall, A. D., 187 Strauss, Richard, 111, 116–7, 120, 126 Stravinsky, Igor, 3, 82, 84, 111, 113, 115, O’Hara, Frank, 8, 14, 17, 18, 20 124, 125, 276 Ogden, Thomas, 128 Symbolists, 3, 164, 191–2, 194–7, 209 Orwell, George, 230, 245 Owen, Wilfred, 26 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 157, 161–3, 165 Oxford, 6, 26, 70, 141, 216–9, 221, 224, Tippins, Sherill, 84, 136, 138 237, 243, 275, 277 Trilling, Lionel, 231, 249 Oxford Book of Light Verse, The, 44 Oxford Poetry 1926 & 1927, 217–9 United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), 25, 251–2, 253–7, 259–62, Panofsky, Erwin, 53–4, 66 264–5, 267, 270, 273 Parkes, Henry Bamford, 219 Pears, Peter, 37, 84, 136 Valassopoulo, George, 140, 141 Pearson, Norman Holmes, 243 Valéry, Paul, 1, 2, 3, 11, 15, 191–209, Perloff, Marjorie, 8 210, 212, 213, 285, 288 Plath, Sylvia, 10, 16 Vendler, Helen, 8, 18 Plato, 56, 127, 138–9, 148, 281–2 Vygotsky, Lev, 114 Plumb, Charles, 217–8 Pope, Alexander, 17, 43, 237, 284 Waldorf Conference, 244–5, 247 Pound, Ezra, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 21 Wasley, Aidan, 86, 106, 109, 271 Porteus, Hugh Gordon, 219 Wetzsteon, Rachel, 142, 186 White, E. B., 235 Rich, Adrienne, 232 Whitman, Walt, 236 Rolfe, Edwin, 236, 237 Wilbur, Richard, 232, 238 Rotha, Paul, 49, 50, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, Wilson, Edmund, 236–7 67, 91 Winnicott, D. W., 128, 129, 132 Russell, Bertrand, 217 Witteman, Adolph, 103, 105 Womack, James, 141 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 242 Woolf, Leonard, 141 Shakespeare, William, 5, 40, 42, 117, 179–89, 252 Yeats, William Butler, 3, 17, 45, 71, 72, Socrates, 138, 142, 199 76, 157, 167, 173–4, 176, 192, 233, Spanish Civil War, 33, 48, 55, 108, 275–6, 279; see also Auden’s “In 236 Memory of W. B. Yeats” Spender, Stephen, 1, 17, 49, 72, 75, 135, Yourcenar, Marguerite, 139, 147, 152 137, 143, 147, 158, 194, 197, 223, 243 Zhdanov, Andrei, 246–7
Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4