Vol. 6 No. 5 · 15 March 1984
pages 10-11 | 3900 words
Power Systems
John Bayley
- Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T. S. Eliot by Steve Ellis
Cambridge, 280 pp, £20.00, October 1983, ISBN 0 521 25126 5
- Dante the Maker by William Anderson
Hutchinson, 497 pp, £7.95, September 1983, ISBN 0 09 153201 9
- Dante: Purgatory translated with notes and commentary by Mark Musa
Indiana, 373 pp, £19.25, September 1981, ISBN 0 253 39140 7
- Dante: Paradiso and Purgatorio with translation and commentary by Charles Singleton
Princeton, 610 pp, £11.80, May 1982, ISBN 0 691 01844 8
- Virgil: The Aeneid translated by Robert Fitzgerald
Harvill, 403 pp, £12.50, March 1984, ISBN 0 00 271008 0
More than most artists, poets are free in their creations. Valéry commented that after – and only after – the poet has spoken does he know what he has said. It is also true, and for the same reason, that what the poet has said may be taken in many different ways by his readers. Blake would have agreed with Shelley’s note about God at the end of ‘Queen Mab’, that ‘the works of His fingers have borne witness against Him.’ In whatever spirit of humility a great poet undertakes to demonstrate a transcendental view of our situation, and justify the ways of God to men, the labours of his imagination will be reinterpreted and even misrepresented by the different vision of later poets.
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Letters
Vol. 6 No. 10 · 7 June 1984
From Alan Ansen
SIR: How can John Bayley (LRB, Vol. 6, No 5) call Auden ‘exemplar of English poets for whom Dante’s example has meant little or nothing’ when Auden himself has written in the ‘Sessions of the Poets’ section of the first part of New Year Letter:
So, when my name is called, I face,
Presiding coldly on my case,
That lean hard-bitten pioneer
Who spoiled a temporal career
And to the supernatural brought
His passion, senses, will and thought,
By Amor Rationalis led
Through the three kingdoms of the dead.
And when he imitated him fairly directly in the only relatively recently published unfinished poem ‘In the Year of My Youth’, and has obviously approved by following the practice of establishing ideological frameworks for verse, though in Auden’s case the ideology may have shifted rather more than in Dante’s. If Auden takes Dante’s protestation ‘Io non Enea, io non Paolo sono’ more seriously than did Yeats and Shelley, Dante is a rich enough poet to have many kinds of disciple. In an essay ‘Criticism in a Mass Society’ Auden writes: ‘The three greatest influences on my own work have been, I think, Dante, Langland and Pope.’
Alan Ansen
Athens
Vol. 6 No. 11 · 21 June 1984
From John Bayley
SIR: I bow to Mr Ansen’s good memory (LRB, Vol. 6, No 10) for things in Auden which I should have remembered myself. But I stand by the comment to which he takes exception. However much Auden may have invoked Dante, Dante does not get into his verse. For one thing, it is never dignified. Few English poets are less like Dante, it seems to me.
John Bayley
St Catherine’s College, Oxford
