Susan, this all takes me back to when I taught college level literature. I have made certain changes to the threads you mention so that they might resemble chalk board session photos from a class. The simple reason that I didn’t do those as-if classroom discussion revisions of the great (Auden and Yeats) then when the threads were first posted, is that I was, shall we say, chickenshit. I definitely include Vincent Millay among the greats. Your point about Dickinson and others is inarguable. On one of those threads someone said approximately that We have to take the weak parts with the best parts with author so-and-so. That’s not necessarily so. Editors and critics have been cherry picking quotes from poets ever since “On the Sublime” by Pseudo-Longinus 2,000 years ago, and that guy (or woman?), Pseudo-Longinus, saved a great fragment by Sappho that we would not have otherwise.
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