Une Saison en enfer for many years—he donateda copy to the Bibliotheque nationale in 1938. Acopy he gave to Jules Mouquet was purchasedby the British Library in 1982 (C.i29.m.i3.).This copy has two interlaced Ls stamped in theupper blank margin of the front wrapper andbelow the last line of text; on the first page ithas the inscription 'A Monsieur Jules Mouquet,l'editeur des Vers de college d'Arthur Rimbaud'(Mouquet's edition was published in 1933). Itis in a fine binding by Rose Adler, signed anddated 1948. Reproduced in Martin Breslauer,Fine Bindings Catalogue 104, part II, (1981),col. pi. xiii.

17 Bulletin, i, ler fasc. (1908), p. [3].18 Revue de Belgique, Annee 37 (Oct. 1905), pp.

105-11.19 Robert Dumont, Stefan Zweig et la France

(Paris, 1967), pp. 31-88, discusses the friendshipbetween the two men, Verhaeren's influence onZweig and Zweig's writings on the poet. Seealso D. A. Prater, European of yesterday: abiography of Stefan Zweig (Oxford, 1972), pp.22-98 passim.

20 Zweig was deeply hurt by Verhaeren's expressionof bitter anti-German feelings in works such asLa Belgique sanglante and Les Ailes rouges de laguerre, written after the German invasion ofBelgium.

21 For a list of Zweig's translations of Verhaeren'sworks see Randolph J. Klawiter, Stefan Zweig:a bibliography. University of North CarolinaStudies in the Germanic Languages and Litera-tures, no. 50 (Chapel Hill, 1965), pp. 70-71. In1912, Zweig also organized Verhaeren's highlysuccessful lecture tour in Hamburg, Berlin,Vienna and Munich. See Prater, European ofYesterday, pp. 42-4.

22 Zweig, Erinnerungen an Emile Verhaeren(Vienna, 1917). All references are to the Frenchedition Souvenirs sur Emile Verhaeren (Brussels,

23 Zweig, ibid., p. 76.24 See Zweig's contribution in La nervie, numero

special consacre a Louis Pierard, 1930, i, pp.20-21. See also Trois cent trente-deux lettres aLouis Pierard, precedees de Memoires exterieurspar Marianne Pierson-Pierard, Lettres modernes,Avant-siecle, 11 (Paris, 1971), p. 16.

25 Louis Pierard, 'Le Wallon a l'Orange', La Societenouvelle, i4e annee, tom. ii (2e serie, vol. xxx,oct.-dec. 1908), p. 81. The German premiere ofHelene de Sparte {Helena's Heimkehr), in Zweig'stranslation, was given on 13 October 1910, atthe Stuttgarter Hoftheater, nearly two yearsbefore its Paris premiere, on 4 May 1912, at theChatelet.

26 Zweig, Souvenirs sur Emile Verhaeren, p. 137.27 Stefan Zweig, Paul Verlaine. Die Dichtung, Eine

Sammlung von Monographien, vol. xxx (Berlin-Leipzig, 1905). All references are taken from theEnglish edition, Paul Verlaine (Boston, Dublin& London, 1913), where 'The Rimbaud Episode'is on pp. 38-50.

28 Arthur Rimbaud, Gedichte [tr. from the Frenchby K. L. Ammer {pseud, of Karl Klammer)],(Leipzig, 1907).

29 Zweig, Verlaine (1913), p. 49, note. Berrichon'sLettres de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud was publishedin 1899.

30 Zweig, ibid., p. 41: 'he never had a single lineprinted by his own efforts, he was utterlyregardless ofthe fleeting examples of his giganticpower'.

31 Pierson-Pierard, op. cit., p. 346.

W. H. A U D E N ' S POEMS OF 1928

Joanna Leevers

IN April 1987 the Modern British Sectionof the British Library acquired a rare andimportant copy of W. H. Auden's Poems of1928. This was Auden's first published work,privately printed by his fellow poet and under-graduate Stephen Spender during the Oxford

summer vacation. It is a surprisingly smallvolume measuring only 12 x 95 cm., bound inlimp orange covers; the title-page reads: W.H. AUDEN [long rule] POEMS [short rule]S.H.S.: 1928. Its pagination is pp. [i-iv, 1-2]3-37 [38-40]^ and a printed erratum slip is

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loosely inserted between pp. 6 and 7. The Isherwood in a Soho restaurant in 1927. Fol-British Library copy, press-mark C.i9O.aa.24., lowing this meeting, Auden wrote to Upwardhas manuscript alterations by Auden himself. several times enclosing poems for him toThough it is stated on page two that 'About 45 comment on, and in return Upward sent Audencopies' were produced. Spender later admitted a copy of his short story The Railway Accident.that thirty was a more realistic figure,^ The The importance of the literary discussions andbook has since become, in the words of Chris- correspondence between Auden, Upward andtopher Isherwood, 'a bibliophile's prize'.-^ Isherwood is alluded to in Auden's letter toOwing to its scarcity, this edition of Auden's Upward which accompanied this copy of theearliest poems has received httle attention from Poems. He acknowledges half-jokingly 'I shallcritics, yet it is a seminal work by one of thetwentieth century's most influential and prolificpoets. It contains work written before Audenwent to Berlin and wrote most of the materialfor the edition of Poems published by Faber& Faber in 1930. Some of the poems werenever republished, but nevertheless played animportant part in Auden's poetic development.

-About 45 copies.

Fig. I. Verso of title page

never know how much in these poems is filchedfrom you via Christopher'.* In years to comeUpward was to exert a more direct politicalinfluence on Auden.

Spender began printing Poems, together withhis own Nine Experiments, at his parents' houseat 10 Frognal, in Hampstead. The BritishLibrary only has the 1964 facsimile of NineExperiments, which has a foreword by Spenderexplaining that he 'later retrieved and destroyedas many copies of Nine Experiments as possible.Thus it is probably rarer than the AudenPoems, though not nearly as remarkable, forthe latter contains some work that even todaycounts among his most interesting, and unlikemy pamphlet, it is nothing to be ashamed o fAt first Auden's Poems was hand-printed witha primitive 'Adana printing set price £-] forchemists' labels';^ however, when Spender'spatience and the machine broke down, he tookit to be completed and bound at the HolywellPress in Oxford. The original copy was suppliedin both handwritten and typewritten form byA. S. T. Fisher, and Auden himself. AudenUntil now, the British Library has held only

facsimiles ofthe 1928 Poems, reproduced fromcopiesbelongingtoMr John Johnson (no. 12), continued to send Spender copy whilst heDurham University Library (no. 24), and the was setting up the poems. The compositor'sUniversity ofCincinnati Library (no. 17). The mistakes and uneven printing that resultedcopy recently acquired is no. 9 (fig. i), and was from this rather haphazard method of publi-originally presented by Auden to the novelist cation add a certain character to the finishedEdward Upward. Only close friends and rela- product. As in other copies, the inking ontives were given copies of the book, and this pp. 3 and 18 is particularly uneven, and thecopy had until now remained unrecorded.^ It numbers of pages 18 and 20 are miss-set sois signed by both Auden and Upward, and that they appear in the gutter instead of theits provenance stands as a testimony of the fore-edge of the page. The printing noticeablyenduring friendship between the two writers, improves from p. 23 onwards; this was theThey were first introduced by Christopher point at which the Holywell Press took over.

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Just as Auden continued to send Spenderpoems once printing had begun, he continuedthe process of addition and deletion after allthe copies were printed. In the facsimile copiesto which I have had access these alterationsare inserted by Spender; the British Library'scopy, however, has only a few minor alterationsin Spender's hand, the remainder being byAuden. This copy may well be unique in thisrespect.

The book is therefore not simply the productof an important publishing project, but anexample of an aspect of the creative processwhich Auden was often at pains to emphasise.He was a perfectionist and a firm believer inValery's dictum: 'A poem is never finished,only abandoned', to which he adds 'Yes, butit must not be abandoned too soon'.^ He wasnever satisfied, and his poems went throughendless stages of revision. Such linguistic 'tin-kering' (as he termed it) is particularly signifi-cant at this early stage of his career, for he wasabout to emerge as a leading voice for thewriters of the 1930s; Stephen Spender hasdeclared retrospectively 'The 1930s began in1928'.'' These poems and their alterations seeAuden formulating a poetic form and languagewith which to launch himself and his contempo-raries into the historic decade. Today, manyliterary critics influenced by the linguistictheory established by Ferdinand de Saussure,and by structuralism, might be interested inAuden's various choices of words, or 'signifi-ers'. Where he has substituted certain words,the text can be viewed as a focal point wheresignifiers intersect and the whole linguisticprocess of signification is set in motion.®

The way in which Auden structured hispoems was in radical contrast to his prede-cessors. The insertions in the British Library'scopy bear witness to the enthusiasm with whichhe juggled his lines. Isherwood claims that hisown opinions played a large part in this:^

it into a new poem. In this way whole poems wereconstructed which were simply anthologies of myfavourite lines, entirely regardless of grammar or

sense . . .

Perhaps crediting Auden with rather moreartistic integrity, Stephen Spender corrobor-ates:

. . . he was not shocked at the idea of tacking linesfrom a rejected poem onto a new one—as though apoem were not a single experience but a mosaic heldtogether by the consistency of an atmosphere, arhythm or an idea common to all its parts.

Thus 'the earlier poems are often made up ofscraps of still earlier ones','° and these hnesare again recycled in later works. Poem II, 'Onthe frontier at dawn getting down', appears inits entirety only in this book, but its openingline was re-used four years later in The Orators.Only nine of the original twenty poems arereprinted in the 1930 Faber & Faber edition.Some have been revised, and the final fourpoems are reworked into the charade 'Paid onboth sides'. In the 1932 edition a further fivewere cut. Only the remaining four wereincluded in Auden's Collected Poems (London,1976), where they are entitled: 'The Water-shed', 'The Love-letter', 'The Secret Agent'and 'As well as can be expected' (later retitled'Taller Today'). Tbe editor Edward Mendelsonwrites in his preface 'This edition includes allthe poems that W. H. Auden wished to pre-serve, in a text that represents his final revision'.But, as Auden was aware, and the BritishLibrary's purchase of Poems confirms: ̂ ^

There are no secret literary sins. By cutting orrevising a bad poem in later editions, one may showrepentance, but the first is still there; one can neverforget or conceal from others that one has com-mitted it.

The second poem in the British Library'scopy is heavily annotated; significantly it wasexcluded from later collections. In the originalprinting, lines 39-44 read:

If I didn't like a poem, he threw it away and wroteanother. If I liked a line, he would keep it and work

In ticking silence, IGripping an oily rail

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Talking feverishly to oneProfessional listener,I know, old boy, I knowAnd reached his hand for mine

10Gripping an oily rail,

}*Ju.£> ^.Jl ^ t»-Talked feverishly to one*«ft"i H K - ^ Professional listener

7 Knot./, *I know uld»bo^ 1 koowAnd reached his hand for oiine.

No%v in a brown studyAt ihe Miiltr-logged quarry.

Fig. 2. Manuscript alterations to Poem II

With the alterations in manuscript (fig. 2), itreads:

In tickling silence I,Gripping an oily rail.Talked feverishly to oneProfessional listenerWho puckered mouth and browIn ecstasy of pain,I know, I know, I knowAnd reached his hand for mine

Both the influences on Auden and his futuredirection are discernible in these poems. Hewas writing at a time when poetry was viewedas a viable link between the personal andthe increasingly confusing public and politicalworld. Poetry was becoming recognized as aparticular type of discourse, which could per-haps organise what T. S. Eliot had called the'immense panorama of futility and anarchywhich is contemporary history'.^^ The pioneerof New Criticism, I. A. Richards, believed thatpoetry 'is capable of saving us; it is a perfectlypossible means of overcoming chaos'.̂ -^

and private despair'.'* Eliot's vision of a wasteland was one which was slowly penetrating theworld of Oxford students. Auden commentedon his days at Oxford: 'We were far too insularand preoccupied with ourselves to know or carewhat was going on across the Channel . .Before 1930 I never opened a newspaper.'^^This was a generation who saw strike breakingduring the General Strike as a 'tremendousmiddle-class lark','^ and inhabited private fan-tasy worlds, like Isherwood and Upward'sinvented land of Mortmere.

But Auden's poems are an attempt to redressthe balance, to understand or at least acknowl-edge the rift between the private and publicspheres. In their preface to the 1926 volumeof Oxford Poetry, Auden and Charles Plumbproposed that *If it is a natural preference toinhabit a room with casements opening uponFairyland, one at least of them should openupon the Waste Land'.^'' In the wake of Eliot,Auden's 1928 poems are full of deserts andvalleys—a 'lean country' (Poem II). In PoemVI he laments:

This land, cut off, will not communicate.

The opening lines to The Waste Land resoundthroughout Auden's Poem I where:

In Spring we sawThe bulb pillowRaising the skull.Thrusting a crocus through clenched teeth.

A sense of personal isolation and fragmentationcan be felt from these poems. They werewritten shortly after Auden and Day Lewiswrote the 1927 preface to Oxford Poetry, whichbecame a manifesto for the writers of thethirties. Auden wrote of a world where 'nouniversalized system—political, religious ormetaphysical—has been bequeathed to us'. His

The influence of the images and structure of 1928 poems are an attempt to realign T. S.Eliot's The Waste Land, can be seen throughoutAuden's Poems. Spender wrote recently that'. . . the early poems of Auden all seem tocome out of The Waste Land, a poem thatacted like a rope bridge over an abyss of public

Eliot's now famous 'dissociated sensibility'through the act of writing. Echoing I. A.Richards, the 1927 preface declared 'All genu-ine poetry is in a sense the formation of privatespheres out of public chaos'.

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Auden and his contemporaries could notyet claim to be actively political, though, asStephen Spender recognized: 'The Oxbridgepoets extended essentially aesthetic values intopolitics in defence of freedom. They wrotepolitical poetry but they never judged theirwork by standards derived from politics.'^^Purely by virtue of being a group, or 'gang'.Spender remembers Auden, Isherwood, DayLewis and Rex Warner as 'rather like a shadowcabinet, the successors to the literary heritageof tomorrow'. They were governed 'by J. C.Squire and a group of Georgian poets . . . Thehonorable opposition was Bloomsbury.'^^

The modern poet felt that the language andstructure of the Georgian poets could notexpress his new concerns. The poetic languageof the previous generation seemed redundantand needed to be broken and reinvented.The fragmentary, dense lines of poetry whichemerge from Poems reveal Auden's search foran appropriate poetic. Poem III in the booksees the poet poised between past and futureeras and attempts to forge a link between thetwo, yet as the 1927 preface indicated, thedemise of any unified vision means that nosolution can be offered.

No trenchant passing thisOf future from the past.

But still the mind would teaseIn local irritationAnd difficult imagesDemand an explanationAcross this finite spaceButtressed expensivelyThe pointed hand would placeError in you, in me.

Here, Auden's images are invested with apersonal and an historical significance. Thefrontiers which define 'Auden country'^^ arenot just Auden's, but represent the aspirationsof a whole generation of writers. Several linesand passages convey a sense of standing on thebrink. The opening line to Poem V reads 'Onthe frontier at dawn . . .', and Poem VI, (the

original version of 'The Watershed') begins'Who stands, the crux left of the water-shed . . .'.

The relatively little-known poems in thisbook prove Auden to be an acute diagnosticianof prevalent feelings and also show him for-mulating a language and an imagery with whichto express those feelings. The early poems, likehis manifesto, provided his contemporarieswith metaphors of exploring beyond their im-mediate world. They were to spend the 1930sventuring beyond the immediate in terms ofwriting, travel, politics, sexuality and socialclass. Written on the verge of a new decadeand a new literary movement, Auden's Poemsof 1928 in a sense record this transition, tracinghow:

The womb began its crucial expulsion (Poem IV)

They anticipate the birth and growth of ageneration:

Bones wrenched, weak whimper, lids wrinkled, firstdazzle known.

World-wonder hardened as bigness, years, brought,knowledge, you, . . . (Poem I)

1 Stephen Spender, World Within World (London,1951), p. 116.

2 Christopher Isherwood, 'Some notes onAuden's early poetry', in Monroe K. Spears(ed.), Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays(Englewood Cliffs, 1964), pp. 10-15.

3 B. C. Bloomfield and Edward Mendelson,W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924-1969 (Char-lottesville, 1972), p. 3, records a total of twelvetraced copies.

4 Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden:A Biography (London, 1983), p. 118.

5 Stephen Spender in a letter to B. C. Bloomfield.Bloomfield and Mendelson, W. H. Auden: ABibliography 1924-1969, p. 2.

6 Quoted in B. C. Bloomfield, W. H. Auden: ABibliography: The Early Years through 19^$(Charlottesville, 1964), p. viii.

7 Stephen Spender, 'Where No-one Was WelF,The Observer, 7 Feb. ig88.

8 However, Auden issued words of warning toover-enthusiastic literary students, citing anoccasion when 'one critic made quite a to-do

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about a difference between two versions ofa line, in which he detected an ideologicalsignificance, when in fact, the difference was dueto a typo in one of them'. Bloomfield, op. cit. n,6 above, pp, viii-ix.

9 Christopher Isherwood, 'Some Notes on Au-den's Early Poetry'.

10 Stephen Spender, 'W H Auden and his Poetry',Atlantic Monthly, cxcii (1953), pp. 74-9-

11 Quoted in B. C. Bloomfield, W. H. Auden: ABibliography: The Early Years through 1955., p.viii.

12 T. S. Eliot, 'Ulysses, Order and Myth' (1923),in Frank Kermode (ed.). Selected Prose of T SEliot (London, 1975), pp. 175-9-

13 I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry (London,1926), p. 823. It is significant that in his 1953edition of Science and Poetry, Richards usedlines from three of Auden's poems as epigraphs.

14 Stephen Spender, 'Where No-one Was Well'.15 W. H. Auden, 'As it Seemed to Us', New Yorker,

3 April 1965, p. 80.16 Christopher Isherwood, quoted in Samuel

Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature andPolitics in England in the 1930s (London, 1979),p. 80.

17 Ibid., p. 31.18 Stephen Spender, 'Where No-one Was Well'.19 Stephen Spender, 'W H Auden and his Poetry'.20 Samuel Hynes, op. cit., p. 53.

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