WHEN AUDEN LET A PRINTER REVISE HIS POEM. Clive James (the author of “The Book Of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered”), writes here about the time that a printer mistakenly changed a word in one of Auden’s poems, and Auden let the mistake stand.
The lines from LETTERS FROM ICELAND read (as Auden wrote them):
“And the traveller hopes: ‘Let me be far from any
Physician’; And the poets have names for the sea;”
The printer changed the lines to read:
“And the traveller hopes: ‘Let me be far from any
Physician’; And the ports have names for the sea;”