[New-Poetry] Bishop's drafts cause uproar

[JforJames at aol.com]

I haven't seen the whole Vendler argument against...has others

read it?  (There is just about a paragraph or two on the New  Republic's
online site.) Vendler seems to be arguing that the book is engaging
in 'false advertising'...that the pieces published in the _Edgar Allan  Poe_ 
collection were never meant to see the light of day. But it would seem 
that the state of the manuscript copies, evidence from letters, the  way 
the material was organized, etc., should be able to tell a scholar  or
careful editor something about how Bishop felt about an  unpublished piece. 
And certainly there is precedence for books tracing the successive drafts 
of famous poems...so I don't know what the gripe would be about  that. 
 
A poem, obviously a successive draft, organized with other
poems in similar state in a binder or folder of some kind,  poems 
sent in a letter to another poet (like M. Moore) for comment, etc.,
may very well be 'finished' (or abandoned per Auden via Valery) 
but, for this or that reason remained unsuited  for collection. 
A few scribble lines from a notebook or on a lipsticked stained
cocktail napkin might be stretch to call 'unpublished'.
Finnegan
 
 
 
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