Less studied, more spontaneous, much rawer, unrhymed, Auden’s marginalia are among his greatest poems:

Small tyrants, threatened by big,
sincerely believe
they love Liberty.
…

A dead man
who never caused others to die
seldom rates a statue.

To spend a lifetime in poetry, only to find that what you almost threw away was your best work.

*


                      
The editors transcribe this as follows: ‘was never / Frigate li / like’. Where the editors see ‘li’ at the end of the second line, anticipating the word ‘like’ in the subsequent line, I see the letter ‘w’, taking us back to the ‘w’ that begins the poem, if we can call it a poem, in the word ‘was’. And this changes how I read the poem. ‘W’ here stands for woman – something that Dickinson underlines by writing this particular ‘w’ (not all Dickinson’s w’s look like this, frequently they are more angular, smaller, spikier) so as to accentuate its resemblance to the human breasts. So the fragment reads: ‘was never / Frigate w(oman) / like’. Which makes an immediate kind of sense: Frigates are never like women or Frigates are never womanly. A frigate, up until the mid-twentieth century, referred to a war-vessel, capable of carrying up to sixty guns, sometimes more. This was no place for women, and conditions on these ships were harsh. Sometimes they would be at sea for upwards of a year. Until the introduction of steam ships, they were powered by sails, the foremost of which was ...