“Though a
work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and
can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously ‘truer’ than
others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel
backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good
dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in
relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may
legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.”
Seasoned
readers will detect Auden's distinctive tone, even without proper context.
He is authoritative, not pushy. He makes distinctions without being academically
pedantic. He skirts provocation without quite surrendering to it. He defies you
to take him seriously, and I do. Auden is the smart kid in class who gets away
with outsmarting the teacher and even making him feel flattered.
Auden was
famously word-besotted, as all poets should be. He enthusiastically cribbed from
the Oxford English Dictionary, mining
for rare, antiquated, interesting-sounding words. Auden had left Oxford with a
third-class degree in 1928, the year the completed dictionary was published in
ten volumes. It became his lifelong companion. In the title poem of Epistle to a Godson (1972), he writes: “to
give a stunning / display of concinnity and elegance / is the least we can do,
and its dominant / mood should be that of a Carnival.”
Concinnity is a serendipitous find
for any writer. The OED defines it as “beauty
of style produced by a skilful connection of words and clauses; hence, more
generally, studied beauty, elegance, neatness of literary or artistic style,
etc.” Among the dictionary’s citations is a splendid usage from Edward Dowden’s
Studies in Literature, 1789-1877 (1878):
“But [Walter Savage] Landor’s humor at its best, when truest to his genius,
appears a gayer part of the perfect order of things; he shows himself at times
as great a master as [Joseph] Addison of concinnity in the playful.” The same
might be said of Auden.
By the way,
in his biography of Auden, Humphrey Carpenter noted that Auden, during his
final stay in Austria, would seat himself at dinner on a volume of the OED – “as if (a friend observed) he was
a child not quite big enough for the nursery furniture.”
The poet was
born on this date, Feb. 21, in 1907.
No comments:
Post a Comment