"One can emend a mutilated text": Auden's The Orators and the Old English Exeter Book

Abstract

This article argues that Book I of Auden's 1931 work 'The Orators' does not merely allude to poems in the Old English Exeter Book as source material, but that it participates in a medievalist model of textual production. Auden's poem performs acts analogous to those such as 'compliatio' and 'ordinatio', and deliberately misrepresents and distorts its source texts even as it alludes to them in order to make a point about the transmission and corruption of canonical texts. In addition, some source material is identified here for the first time.