A Poet’s Politics

In his elegy for W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden wrote that, when the Irish poet died in 1939, “he became his admirers.” Becoming his admirers is, however, only the first stage of a poet’s posthumous existence. Once all readers who can remember him as a living being are gone, the poet enters a new stage by becoming his scholars. As the twentieth century recedes into history, its great poets are undergoing this transformation one by one. The 14-volume edition of Yeats’s Collected Works, edited by Richard Finneran, began to appear in 1989, 50 years after Yeats’s death. The definitive edition of T. S. Eliot’s poems, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, was published in two volumes in 2015—again, 50 years after the poet’s death.