'A Passion for Words'

For months I’ve had on hold at the university library the two fat volumes of Auden’s poems recently published by Princeton University Press as part of The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. They have arrived. They total more than 1,900 pages and are priced at $60 each. Thank God for libraries. The editor is Edward Mendelson, literary executor of the Auden estate, to whom every reader is indebted. Mendelson’s heroic act of scholarship includes endnotes that provide every poem’s bibliographical history, and he documents Auden’s obsessive, sometimes misbegotten revisions. 

My reading in them is at once systematic and impulsive. To read such books dutifully, page by page, marking progress with a bookmark as you would a novel, does no one a favor – writer or reader. Unlike many readers, Philip Larkin among them, I favor the post-1939 poet, dating from his arrival in the U.S., so I expect to pay more attention to the early work than I have in the past. The poems I love most date from the 1940’s and 1950’s, the era of “In Praise of Limestone.” His politics, before Auden grew up and returned to Christianity, are often childish and hobble some of the poems.

 

A related pleasure is Auden’s love of not language in general but specific words, often archaic or rare. In 1971 he told an interviewer: “One of my great ambitions is to get into the OED as the first person to have used in print a new word.” He is cited 780 times in the OED. In his poem “In Praise of Auden,” Dick Davis writes:

  

“In the spot-on right place.

            The cliquey tics that irritated

 Swelled up at a compound rate?

 Your campiness and giggly mania

 For the outré? and arcane

            (I owe ‘sessile’ and ‘soodling’ to your nudges,

 Though a surfeit’s like girl-scout fudge

 Each meal for a week till one breakfast

 We gasp out ‘Dear hostess, a break!’”

 

I’ve written before about Auden’s use of soodling. He was fond of words borrowed from science and engineering, such as sessile, an adjective which has various related meaning in biology, including “immediately in contact with the structure to which they are attached; having no connecting neck or footstalk.” He uses it in “Progress?”, written in 1972:

 

“Sessile, unseeing,

the Plant is wholly content

with the Adjacent.

 

“Mobilized, sighted,

the Beast can tell Here from There

and Now from Not-Yet.

 

“Talkative, anxious,

Man can picture the Absent

and Non-Existent.”

 

Such words are like the sea shells and fine porcelain in a museum. I linger over them, admire them, but can’t imagine wanting to own or use them. They are strictly for the page, not the tongue. Shortly after arriving in the U.S., Auden worked on a collection of aphorisms and observations that he ultimately abandoned. Mendelson edited the work, The Prolific and the Devourer, and published it posthumously in 1983. In it Auden writes:

 

“As a child I had no interest in poetry, but a passion for words, the longer the better, and appalled my aunts by talking like a professor of geology. Today words so affect me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do.”