Looking over past writing

To return to my writing—a year, two years, three years after the fact—is an odd experience. Occasionally, I feel a smug satisfaction of writing something so well. It's as if standing in a mirror admiring one's physique: very vain. More often than not, though, I am a bit embarrassed. I find a comma-splice here, a misplaced modifier there, and sometimes plainly horrid writing. Today I was re-reading an essay I wrote a year ago, trying to rewrite the ending in order to submit the essay as a writing sample for a job for which I'm applying. In the final page of the essay (on how I came to love poetry through reading Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts") I found this section:


"Perhaps Stevens is right when he says that death is the mother of all beauty. But if so, it is in a different way than the woman in “Sunday Morning” thinks. Milosz shows us this when he says in an interview that, “every poetry is directed against death–against death of the individual, against the power of death” (64). Death fosters beauty, but only insofar as the beauty is directed against death. But poetry cannot be relegated to books on grief or anthologies of poems for those mourning the loss of a loved one, although some are only read in such contexts. (I am thinking of Auden’s “Stop all the Clocks” or as it is now called, “Funeral Blues.”) In fighting against death, poetry embraces life. The poet and the poem exist not only to give us comfort in the time of need, but also to confront us with hard truths, truths that can sometimes only be uttered in the words of poetry."


What strikes me now is that what I wrote was probably a bit heretical—or at the very least, very Calvinist (perhaps they're synonymous.) Saying that death is the mother of beauty, in that beauty is directed against death, leads to the idea that death is necessary for beauty. This is one step away from saying that God (or the True, if you like) needs death to exist or at least needs it to bring about certain ends. Which is heresy.

Should one go back and rewrite old essays? I don't know....I don't know that much about writing. I tend to want to leave them alone after a few months; they become mile-markers in my past, then. In this case I'm going to rewrite the ending, if only because the recipient of the submission happens to be an ecumenical journal that would notice the conclusions being drawn.