ABSTRACT
‘I am very hard worked but am pegging away at my epic’, Auden wrote to Naomi Mitchison in 1932 (‘You May Well Ask, A Memoir 1920–1940’. London: Gollancz, 1979, p. 123). This unfinished narrative, which consists of two cantos (the first running to 925 lines, the second to 310 lines), has recently been transcribed and published, together with an informative preliminary discussion, by Lucy S. McDiarmid – W.H. Auden’s ‘ In the year of my youth…’, ‘Review of English Studies’, new series, xxix, 115, 1978, pp. 267–312 – who quotes this comment by Auden from an interview conducted long afterwards: ‘It was part of a long poem I started to do around 1930, a very long dream sequence something like the “Roman de la Rose” or the “Hous of Fame” or “The Pastime of Pleasure”. ‘Strongly influenced by Dante, Langland, and Pope, the draft poem presents an alienated vision of a valueless city. McDiarmid also comments:
Long sections of it went into an unpublished play, ‘The Chase’, which was then rewritten as ‘The Dog Beneath the Skin’, and individual lines and phrases turn up throughout the poems in the volume ‘Look, Stranger’, in the ‘verse commentary’ of ‘In Time of War’, and in miscellaneous short lyrics. The alliterative metre makes lines from the poem recognizable in the midst of choruses in ‘The Dog Beneath the Skin’. But the more remarkable aspects of the poem – the use of epic models, the narrative structure, a few incidents and images – are not evident from any of the published fragments….
