'Their Worlds Are Closest to Ours'

At the beginning of his 1947 lecture on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – a play he judges “not wholly successful” -- W.H. Auden discusses “the difference between a major and a minor writer—which is not necessarily the difference between better and worse.” This theme preoccupies me. Recently I encountered yet another reviewer who dismisses the author in question as “minor,” which clearly he intends as a qualitative judgment meaning dull and just plain lousy. The designation comes off as snotty and critically lazy.

Auden clarifies things: “We can forget the bad writers. The minor artist, who can be idiosyncratic, keeps to one thing, does it well, and keeps on doing it—Thomas Campion, for example, A.E. Housman, and in music, Claude Debussy.” 

American literature seems especially rich in excellent minor poets (Yvor Winters, Henri Coulette, Turner Cassity, Kay Ryan), in part because we have so few major poets (Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Eliot). As to classical music composers from any country, think of Erik Satie and Aaron Copland. Auden resumes:

 

“There are minor writers who can mean more to us than any major writer, because their worlds are closest to ours. Great books can be hard to read—in a sense, boring to read. Whom do I read with the utmost pleasure? Not Dante, to my mind the greatest of poets, but Ronald Firbank. The minor writer never risks failure [dubious]. When he discovers his particular style and vision, his artistic history is over [also dubious].”

 

Among the first-rate minor writers are Colette, Max Beerbohm, Walter de la Mare, Ronald Knox, A.J. Liebling, J.V. Cunningham, Peter Taylor, Guy Davenport.  

 

[See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]