A few months ago there was a discussion on this blog about the Living Rights of Dead Authors that dealt with the issue of honoring an author's wishes with regard to his or her work.  This week, I'd like to return to that issue in relation to W. H. Auden, who died on this day--September 29 if you didn't rush to see my post on the day it was uploaded--in 1973, an event that was memorably recorded by the poet Helen Bevington in her journal in the following terms: "Auden died in a Vienna hotel at sixty-six. He found America too perilous to live in, fearful of dying one day in a New York apartment and being discovered a week later by the mailman. He moved back to Christ Church, Oxford, in his carpet slippers, to a mother college's protection."

            Auden is notoriously difficult to edit because he returned to his poems at various times during his career, editing them for collections as well as inserting changes into books that he or his friends owned, sometimes making different changes to the same poems in different copies of a single book; he also had a habit of publishing different versions of the same poems in American and British editions of a single book, and he discussed edits that should be made in letters as well as in private conversations with, I suppose, Edward Mendelson, who incorporated changes Auden talked about making into poems for the Collected Poems.

            Mendelson, in fact, does his best to publish Auden's final intentions in the

Collected Poems  , leaving out pieces that Auden wanted suppressed, including the significant "September 1, 1939," a poem that has taken on new resonance in the age of our wars, or is it war, on terror. Over the last eight years it has been cited by conservatives, despite Auden's communist sympathies in the 1930s, and liberals to make a point about the significance of 9/11 to our lives. I have seen Auden's "low dishonest decade" used to denigrate both the 1960s, the origin of everything bad in contemporary American life according to the commentator, and the 1990s. I would be surprised if the phrase hasn't been used to describe the 1970s and 1980s, the latter being my candidate for a "low dishonest decade" in my life time. (Ketchup is a vegetable indeed!)  

            Such appropriations are valid in their own way, but they have nothing to do with a writer's intentions. What intentions we are ideally supposed to honor in the case of Auden, as well as a number of other writers who were constant editors of their work, is not easy to determine. Even Mendelson is not consistent. He includes the 1939 poem, as well as others that Auden wanted suppressed, in his edition of the Selected Poems, which collects 100 poems as they first appeared in print. (My copy is the Faber and Faber edition. I suppose an American one exists. It would be very interesting if Mendelson used American versions of poems in the American edition and British versions in the British one.)

            If Auden were alive, permission to publish some of the poems and the early version of others would not likely be granted, but Auden also wrote, "if anybody wants to look up my writings from an historical perspective, I have no objection." Not reprinting the historical versions, however, is an objection in itself, for unless one lives near an incredible library, that is, one that bought the books or journals in which the early versions of the poems appeared and didn't purge them from their shelves a few years later, one will be unable "to look up [the] writings."

            Granting permission when Auden, if he were alive, presumably wouldn't is the only way to honor the author's historical, if not final, intentions. The ideal collected poems of Auden, one perhaps for scholars of his work rather than the general reader, would contain all variations of every poem, not in notes but in complete form in order to remove an editor's ability to attempt to create authoritative versions. Many collections of poems deserve similar treatment, for example Michael Drayton's sonnet sequence Idea, which Drayton changed throughout his career, revising poems, removing others, and adding new ones. That would be a complete edition.