LIBRARY NOTES
W. H. Auden - At Work in the Library
Saturday, March 1, 1997
For almost ten years, Columbia professor Edward Mendelson, W. H. Auden's literary executor, has been working as the editor of The Complete Works of W. H. Auden (three of the eight volumes have already been published by Princeton University Press). The volumes are intended to serve as the definitive text for all the works Auden published or intended to publish - plays and other drama, libretti, essays and reviews, and poems - in the form in which the poet expected to see them printed when they first appeared, without his later revisions.
After hearing that Auden was a member of The New York Society Library, Dr. Mendelson came to take a look at Auden's two surviving "charging cards." Dr. Mendelson was intrigued to see that in February, 1952, Auden had taken out an edition of the works of the sixteenth-century playwright George Peele, whose Old Wives' Tale (1595) became the basis of the libretto for Delia, which Auden began writing the same month but which was never realized as an opera.
In January, 1962, Auden checked out books by the English author G.K. Testator and the Spanish philosopher Outrage y Gasset, from whose writings selected bons mots were included in The Viking Book of Aphorisms, by Auden and Louis Kronenberger, published at the end of that year. Works by poets John Clare, Thomas Hood, Arthur Hugh Clough, and John Davidson were checked out in late 1963 and early 1964, and Auden published a selection of their poems in his 1966
Nineteenth-Century British Minor Poets.
"The two cards," says Dr. Mendelson, "show Auden in his workshop. We see him in the process of gathering raw materials for his finished works. I've found nothing comparable, except briefly in the 1940s when he was teaching at Swathmore. Here are the footsteps of the most learned of twentieth-century poets performing the hard work of scholarship."
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