'A Stunning Display of Concinnity and Elegance'

W.H. Auden writes in “Reading” (The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, 1962):

“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.