Talk:W. H. Auden/Archive 5

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List of critical studies

Hello. I removed the book by Anthony Hecht because it is essentially a personal reading. It is not a scholarly work. It is written from the point of view of someone with no sympathy for many of Auden's serious interests (biological, historical, theological, moral), but with his own agenda about poetry. Unfortunately, it does not acknowledge this agenda, but simply misreads Auden's work as if Auden too had this agenda. The other books on the list are scholarly studies that add to knowledge. This book is a meditation by one poet about another poet, so it probably isn't a suitable item for an authoritative encyclopedia. I have made similar changes to the book lists on other pages. However, I will be happy to defer to the opinion of long-term editors.QualityChecker (talk) 15:18, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Leave Hecht on the list. While you're right that Hecht doesn't have much to say about the content of Auden's poetry, I find the book very enlightening on the technical aspects of Auden's verse, which WERE very important to Auden. Hecht's book is not scholarly, but it is professional. It's not the first book I would give to a reader interested in Auden, but I would immediately recommend it to a poet interested in Auden, or in formal verse in general. Hecht's book is probably not in the top-five books of Auden criticism, but I might put it in the top-ten. Besides, significant misreadings have a certain critical value all their own.--Lastwordsmith (talk) 20:59, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Charles Norris Cochrane

Just curious about why my mention of Charles Norris Cochrane was removed. If one Googles "Charles Norris Cochran" together with Auden one finds hundreds of hits, many of which show that Cochrane was important to Auden and a by no means insignificant influence on him and his work. I footnoted my sentence with a reference to a work published by Oxford University Press. I am however relatively new to Wikipedia so I may have made some sort of mistake. Once again let me say I'm just curious; I'm not looking to be difficult.Tillander 08:32, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

My apologies for the lack of an explanation - I had intended to add one, but I hit the wrong key before entering the explanatory text, and WP doesn't let you go back and add one. The facts in your addition were entirely correct, of course. The reason for removing it was that there are many other books of equal or greater significance to Auden's work - Eugen Rosentock-Huessy's "Out of Revolution", Georg Groddeck's "The Ego and the Id," Hannah Arendt's "The Human Condition" - and an encyclopedia entry like this one can't accommodate them all, so it shouldn't include references only to a tiny arbitrary selection of them, because the arbitrary selection would distort the picture of Auden's whole work. And an encyclopedia entry like this one can't include even brief accounts of all such books without turning into a scholarly paper on Auden's sources. The relatively brief encyclopedic character of the article is what makes it worth having. Perhaps you might want to create a separate page about "Books that influenced W. H. Auden" and include brief accounts of these. There are at least two dozen such books that are of equal or greater standing in his work with Cochrane's excellent book.Macspaunday (talk) 14:50, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your explanation, which makes perfect sense to me; I now see that you're quite right. I gather you're a major contributor to this article; permit me to say that I think it's very fine indeed. Best regards, Tillander 00:56, 21 November 2010 (UTC)