In my opinion, the only one that matters to me, Auden's first version
of the poem in question is the best. It is tendentious as it was
meant to be. As such I consider it to be a great poem within the
genre of political preachings. The fact that I am an unabashed
liberal probably explains my admiration for the poem. Political poetry
is certainly not my favorite, but I love a good speech. There are
many genres of poetry that I like better, but I tip my hat to pretty
speechifying such as Auden was capable of. Why he would turn his back
on it is (was) his choosing. It doesn't diminish one iota my
admiration for the poem. I am indifferent towards all artists. It is
their artistry that matters to me. I find his editing and his
justification for it insipid concerns of a spoiled brat. Amen.
On 6/29/15, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That's all true, I agree, but if memory serves me, the inaptness of------------------------------------------------------------------
language was pointed out by critics (20 years earlier) and he had to
agree with them. The criticism didn't make him want to destroy the poem
however. I believe he edited the poem in a subsequent collection to say
"love one another _and_ die" -- again, if I remember correctly, but the
use of the poem by President Johnson made him hate the poem.
Furthermore, he was in the process of approving the proofs of a
collection of his shorter poems at the time (of Johnston's political
use) and delayed approval for seven weeks in order to make sure there
was nothing in them that could be used by a politician for political
purposes.
Thus, he was admittedly unhappy with the poem two decades earlier
because critics panned it and he had to agree with their criticisms, but
Johnson's use of the poem raised his unhappiness to a new level.
There was something earlier in the bio about this poem, perhaps it would
shed more light on Auden's thinking, but I couldn't immediately turn to
it. Do we care? I finished the biography and know quite a lot more
about Auden, and while I read several of his referenced poems, I can't
say that I appreciated any of them. My initial (mild) dislike of his
poetry hasn't been overturned.
Lawrence
On 6/29/2015 3:43 AM, Donal McEvoy wrote:
Though the H-D information is interesting there are two distinct
issues (a) the aptness of the poem's language (when considered simply
as a poetic work) (b) misuse or misappropriation of the poem's
language by others (say for political purposes).
In the light of the above information, Auden's concerns re (a) predate
by two decades his concerns re (b) in 1964. So his concerns re (b)
cannot explain his prior concerns re (a); and though they may have
reinforced his earlier concerns, and while we might link (a) and (b)
by saying that the inaptness of poetic language may be part-measured
by how it may be misused by others, there is a lack of analysis in the
above account - both in being clear about the distinctness of issues
(a) and (b), the different times these issues arose and the
complexities of their possible interconnectedness. For these reasons,
the above information remains unsatisfactory as an "explanation".
Dnl
Ldn
On Monday, 29 June 2015, 5:51, Lawrence Helm
<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As Speranza would say, "my last post of the day"!
We previously speculated about why Auden changed the subject line and
then hated this poem so much that he deleted it from his collected
works. Davenport Hines provides another opinion -- or perhaps the
correct explanation.
On page 319 of /Auden, /Davenport-Hines writes, "Later that year
[1964] there was a repellent public episode which must have heightened
his fear. As early as 1944 Auden had dropped from 'September 1, 1939'
the stanza which included his most famous line, 'We must love one
another or die.' He explained that the line was a lie, for we must
die anyway whether r not we love, which some of his critics thought
was frivolous. 'Perhaps they prefer literature to tell lies: that way
it frees itself from responsibility to the world of ethics, where lies
have real and painful consequences,' his executor Edward Mendelson
reflected later. Now during the US presidential election of 1964,
when the incumbent Lyndon Johnson was publicly denouncing his opponent
as a warmonger while privately planning to obliterate Vietnam by
bombing, Johnson's campaign ran a television advertisement which
caused such controversy that a still photograph from it was used on
the front cover of /Time/ magazine. The advertisement featured 'a
little girl counting the petals of a flower, then interrupted her with
a stern male voice counting down from ten to zero -- when the little
girl was abruptly replaced on the screen by a nuclear explosion. This
left viewers rather shaken. Before they recovered, they heard
Johnson's voice intoning, 'These are the stakes: to make a world in
which all of God's children can live, or go into the dark. We must
love each other or we must die".' The dark, and possibly the
children, as well as Johnson's misquotation, echo Auden's poem.
"This was a shockingly offensive incident to which Auden never
referred directly, though the degradation of his ideas clearly
rankled. 'One cannot let one's name be associated with shits,' Auden
wrote shortly afterwards to Stella Musulin. It was no wonder that
after this Auden felt repelled by 'September 1, 1939', 'the most
dishonest poem I have ever written', he told Naomi Mitchison: 'I pray
to God that I shall never be memorable like that again.' "
Davenport-Hines goes on to say that Auden spent a lot of time removing
lines from other poems that might be used for political purposes.
Lawrence
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