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• W15394296 abstract "In 1940 Auden wrote his long poem New Year Letter partly to renounce the political and propagandistic ambitions of those poems of the 1930s in which, he wrote, he had Adopted what I would disown,/The preacher's loose immodest tone. Now, in the first months of a war that his poetry, and those who sympathized with his poetry, had been powerless to postpone or prevent, he altered his ambitions, and he soon began planning a collected edition of his poems that would exclude some of his earlier works and include others in severely revised forms. But he knew that the work of revision, no matter how generously intended, was not a simple matter of correction or improvement. We are changed by what we change, he wrote in New Year Letter, and even when the act of revision was a renunciation of political power, the act of revision itself was one that made use of an intoxicating and secret power of its own. We are changed by what we change is a line that occurs in a passage in the poem that is based partly on twentieth-century physics, partly on modern psychology, and partly on Auden's moral critique of power. All of these kinds of knowledge insisted that it is impossible to treat anything--whether a person or a word--merely as an object that can be acted upon, without oneself being affected in turn by the same action. When Auden thought or wrote in later years about the revisions that he had made before publication, and about the revisions that he made to his published work when he prepared it for new editions, he invariably thought about the effects that the revisions had on himself as well as on his poems. First, in his characteristically extreme sense of the ethical significance of ordinary actions, he recognized that the act of revision was an exercise of power. To revise was to use power: power to organize words on a page, to exclude words that one had included earlier, to supplant one class of words with another class. And this power, like all power, can intoxicate those who wield it with fantasies of their own omnipotence. This power can encourage the psychological and political fantasy that the same power that the poet exercises so lucidly and effectively in revising his poems may also be used with equal lucidity and effectiveness for the purpose of controlling persons and events. The same power that brings about formal excellence inevitably tempts the poet into a corrupting belief in his personal excellence. Secondly, because he recognized the pernicious effect of this power on himself, Auden deliberately attempted, when revising his poems, to renounce or to expose the power that he used in to make the revisions. And the revisions that he valued most in his work were those that resulted in part either from accidents or from actions that were not his own. For example, a friend once misread his handwriting and praised him for writing a phrase that he had not in fact written, but which he now incorporated into the poem(1,) or when another friend pointed out that in another poem he had violated the metrical rules that he had imposed on himself when writing it, and Auden immediately sat down to correct the offending lines(2). In 1948 Auden was one of the four authors of the book that initiated the theoretical study of modern manuscripts in the English-speaking world, Poets at Work: Essays Based on the Modern Poetry Collection at the Lockwood Memorial Library, University of Buffalo.(3) Auden titled his essay Squares and Oblongs, a phrase from Virginia Woolf's The Waves in which the ability to construct a work of art is described as the greatest of human successes: We have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation. The essay is a collection of aphorisms about poetry, poets, and readers, and concerns itself partly with the glorification of poets by themselves and by their audience, partly with the way poetry comes to be written, and the way that poets and their readers interpret the poet's power to give shape to a poem. …" @default.
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• W15394296 date "1995-05-01" @default.
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• W15394296 title "We Are Changed by What We Change: The Power Politics of Auden's Revisions" @default.
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