ABSTRACT
In his poem “The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning,” published in 1955, W.H. Auden urges upon love poets the most elaborate style: “Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever. . . . From such ingenious fibs are poems born.” This is the best way to court “your Beatrice,” and it may help you in times of political violence:
“Re-sex the pronouns,” “such ingenious fibs”: forgive me if I seem obsessed, but this sounds like a closeted gay aesthetic. Hostility from the authorities in affairs of the heart is not experienced only by lesbians and gay men, but the topic does bite with a certain shrewdness for them. The joke in the poem is that to please the vain dictator you change your pronouns to the same sex.
