The Unpublished Poetry of Owen Dodson

Abstract

The following is a selection of the unpublished poetry of Owen Dodson (19141983), culled from old handwritten or typewritten drafts found in various folders. Dodson, not unlike many poets, was accustomed to writing whenever the writing mood surfaced, and on whatever surface was at hand. He would write while at dinner, or in transit, on the backs of napkins, or on handbills, or brown paper bags; most of what survives, even some of the typewritten poems, are illegible or have portions missing. Some of these are early versions of later published poems; some are what Dodson might have considered failed efforts. Many of them are ideas which may have seemed wonderfully rich in their conception, but were ultimately distorted in their execution, and much of the distortion came from either or both of two sources: rheumatism and alcohol. What remains undistorted in these poems is Dodson's tragic sense of life as circumscribed by the recurrent specter of death. While Dodson was still a youth, the deaths of both his parents, only eighteen months apart, left their first and lasting impressions. Later in life, the death of his brother, and the passing of close friends and associates such as Paul Robeson, W.H. Auden, and Arna Bontemps, all within only a few months, reinforced an already pronounced awareness of mortality.' Nevertheless, there also appears in Dodson's poetry, in opposition to the threat of death, the eternal promise of faith. Sometimes this too suffers, but it always seems prepared to ward off death with its countervailing presence. At the horizon of this urge toward faith is a strong religious sensibility, nurtured by a strict Baptist upbringing. But the God of Dodson's universe must work long hours and often put in overtime, as death-wearing among its several guises cynicism, despair, failed intimacy, and racial discord-is capable of inciting chaos without notice. These two cosmic elements, faith and death, eternally at war with each other, characterize Dodson's poetic career-even and perhaps especially unto these attempts, which may also have fallen victim to a slow disintegration. Dodson probably responded to these poems as some of us would to so many unruly children-often with regret, but nevertheless with love. Even their flaws reflect something of the marrow of the poet's craft. In these works, talent, structure and nuance prevail as strength, sobriety and security appear, at points, to have ebbed. Though reconstructing these poems has not been a simple task, the responsibility for their remaining flaws is mine alone. Trained in the austere tradition of English poetry, Dodson ordinarily brooked no transgressions. Wherever spelling, punctuation or capitalization has been problematic, I have tried to retain Dodson's idiom as