In message <[log in to unmask]>, Nate and
Jane Dorward <[log in to unmask]> writes
>
>(Apropos of the Clare thread, may I speak up for readers who don't agree
>that the reproduction of unpunctuated, misspelled texts of Clare's straight
>from manuscript serve his work best? In any case there has been work
>published recently arguing that Clare in fact wouldn't have understood the
>obsession with manuscript reproduction, since he actually expected his
>publishers to punctuate & tidy up his poems for publication.)
>
The latter point seems very likely to me. It's in the same spirit that I
bang on about there being by now two distinct Shelley oeuvres. In that
case, though, we're unlikely to suppose that the Garland transcripts
represent anything which PBS wd have regarded as a desirable way to
publish his work. What the transcripts mostly resemble are certain late
20th C texts, by poets deeply concerned with textuality itself. In that
respect I find them very interesting & often exciting. But nobody
(presumably) is going to think this is 'the real Shelley'; the
excitement of the transcript is a spin-off from the attempt to remove
undoubted corruptions from the dozens of dodgy editions. But the case
with Clare, I'd agree, is somewhat more dangerous in that the misspelt
unpunctuated texts might seem to put all too much emphasis on the image
of the 'real' Clare as uneducated 'labouring poet' [that seems to be the
current preferred alternative to 'working class poet' - a bit
unfortunate, I reckon]. Which helps no one. On closer inspection a good
few of the 18th/19th C 'labouring poets' turn out to be rather better
educated than prejudice supposes - & presumably would have
correspondingly sophisticated expectations of what a printer/publisher
would do with their work.
--
Alan Halsey
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