Much of W. H. Auden's most brilliantly evocative poetry was written during the 1930's. His skill in catching the tones, the topics of his time, and his ability to evoke its moods and its social turbulence are unequalled among those of his generation writing of political unrest, international crises and revolution. It is no surprise that the word "Audenesque" has become part of the language of literary criticism describing a particular poetic style. Yet it was his poetry of the '30's that Auden later in his life revised and/or repudiated, creating textual problems involving basic critical issues related to literary interpretation, readers'responses to much-revised poems, and to the way that textual scholars approach the determinate relations among poems as first printed and subsequent, altered versions that are also authoritative. Traditional textual criticism cannot address all of the problems caused by Auden's extensive overhauling, nor can it provide evidence that some of Auden's harshest critics--the British Scrutiny group headed by F. R. Leavis and American critics Joseph Warren Beach and Randall Jarrell--may have dismissed him as a major poet too soon. But a method of textual treatment called versioning--the presentation of the complete texts of two or more different stages of a literary work--may be the most useful and efficient method of textual treatment for authors like Auden, and for readers and critics who might wish to assess the significance of Auden's revised works by comparing them with original texts. / Department of English
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/174704 |
| Date | January 1991 |
| Creators | Adams, Melinda J. |
| Contributors | Miller, William V. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | 474 leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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