ABSTRACT
Auden prefigured his efforts to revise early poems in this letter of 18 May 1942 to Louise Bogan:
Now and then I look through my books and is my face red. One of the troubles of our time is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters. Looking at old work I keep finding ideas which one had no business to see already at that age, and a style of treatment which one ought to have outgrown years before.
I sometimes toy with re-writing the whole lot when I’m senile, like George Moore. (Amherst College Library; a shorter extract figures in Carpenter, op. cit., p. 330)
He responded to this review on 13 April 1945, ‘What a swell write up you gave me in the New Yorker this week. Thanks a lot. The only thing that makes me feel uncomfortable are the references to the Master of Russell Square. I shall never be as great and good a man if I live to be a hundred’ (Amherst College Library). See also Introduction and No. 41 above.