September 1, 1939
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I sit in one of the divesAll I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
TWO SHORT ESSAYS ON THE RELEVANCE OF AUDENS POEM TO A POST SEPTEMBER 11TH SOCIETY.
Auden on Bin Laden
By Eric McHenry
Posted Thursday, September 20, 2001, at 8:30 PM PT
Last Wednesday I e-mailed W.H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939" to members of my family. Two days later a friend e-mailed it to me, having received it from another friend who was circulating it. On Saturday my mother told me that Scott Simon had read portions of it on NPR. And on Monday my wife, a prep school teacher, saw it lying on the faculty photocopy machine.
Tragedy sends people to poetry. "Suffering is exact," Philip Larkin wrote, but the vocabulary of consolation is loaded with abstraction and cliché, as anyone who has tried to write a sympathy note in the past week knows. Naturally, there's a certain comfort in pillowy, familiar phrases—"This too shall pass," "Our hearts are with you"—but living through a day like Sept. 11, and listening to all the subsequent cant from public figures and TV personalities, can leave people craving language that's as precise as their pain.
What's striking about "September 1, 1939," which Auden wrote in response to Germany's invasion of Poland, is how precisely it matches much of what happened last Tuesday, how weirdly prescient it seems. Of course, that's the point: Zealotry and violence are cyclical—"The habit-forming pain,/ Mismanagement and grief:/ We must suffer them all again." But those weren't the lines that brought me to my bookshelf last Wednesday, looking for the poem. The passages that had been playing through my head since I first saw the World Trade Center footage were more concrete and actually seemed more specific to the past week than to the poem's occasion. "Where blind skyscrapers use/ Their full height to proclaim/ The strength of Collective Man," and "Into the ethical life/ The dense commuters come." The poem, which is set in Manhattan, opens with the "unmentionable odour of death/ Offend[ing] the September night," something it could have done only figuratively in 1939, and the poem closes with a candlelight vigil: "May I [...]/ Beleaguered by the same/ Negation and despair,/ Show an affirming flame." Even when Auden is writing explicitly about Hitler, his language could hardly be altered to better fit the hijackers. Borrowing terms from Jungian psychoanalysis, he wonders "What huge imago made/ A psychopathic god." My Muslim friends, whose god is unrecognizable in the murderous theology of Osama Bin Laden, have spent the past week wondering the same thing. Ezra Pound defined poetry as "news that stays news," but even he may not have had this degree of fidelity in mind.
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How To Unite Afghanistan NowCoincidences aside, "September 1, 1939" stays news because it reveals a little more of itself with each reading. Last Wednesday, it gave me some of the emotional nourishment I had been needing, in the form of concise explanations ("Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return") and bold pronouncements ("There is no such thing as the State/ And no one exists alone [...]/ We must love one another or die"). By Thursday, though, it had unsettled me again. Those phrases, despite their rhetorical poise, are undermined by Auden's ambivalence and self-contradiction. Auden seems to doubt whether universal love can obtain in a world where "the error bred in the bone/ Of each woman and each man/ Craves what it cannot have,/ Not universal love/ But to be loved alone." And his poem is, as the critic John Fuller points out, "a parade of rhetoric designed to question the function of rhetoric."
A poem, of course, that offered only unambiguous answers to these sorts of questions would neither be news nor stay news. Poetry does justice to life by describing it, not by reducing it to more reasonable dimensions. So all of Auden's doubts and doublings-back only improve the poem—as far as John Fuller and I are concerned, anyway. Auden, apparently, decided that its ambiguities couldn't be reconciled with its declamatory tone. Rereading it shortly after its publication, he arrived at the line "We must love one another or die" and "said to myself: 'That's a damned lie! We must die anyway.' So, in the next edition, I altered it to 'We must love one another and die.' This didn't seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty—and must be scrapped."
He banished it from subsequent editions of his work, and I'm not sure, frankly, how it finally found its way back into print. I'm thankful it did. Its thematic ambiguity only strengthens the sense that it is the poem for our present pain. When Auden called it "trash which [he was]ashamed to have written," as Edward Mendelson observes, he was taking the poem "far more seriously—and taking poetic language far more seriously—than his critics ever did." By expressing such disappointment in a poem so great, by attaching such a profound sense of failure to it, Auden kept in play the possibility—by no means a certainty—that there are sorrows even the most well-chosen words can't reach.
Auden's Poem Is Drawing New Attention
By PETER STEINFELS
It begins in a bar, ends with a prayer and, after Sept. 11, was endlessly quoted and reprinted to express grief over what had happened and foreboding about what was to come.
"I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty- second Street/Uncertain and afraid," W. H. Auden, responding to the outbreak of World War II, wrote in his poem "September 1, 1939." In an America that was unaccustomed to being uncertain and afraid, yet was determined, as the poem's last line put it, to "show an affirming flame," many people turned to poetry as something akin to religious ritual. And Auden's stanzas in particular quickly took on a quasi-scriptural status.
That was not enough, however, to shield this 62-year-old poem from the close moral and political scrutiny that words and ideas, as well as immigrants, have been receiving in the glare of the war on terrorism.
"Auden's words are everywhere," wrote the author of a "Letter From New York" in The Times Literary Supplement of London. At least a half-dozen major newspapers reprinted "September 1, 1939" in its entirety. It was read on National Public Radio. It was introduced into hundreds of chat rooms on the Internet. In the Chicago area, the Great Books Foundation and The Chicago Tribune sponsored discussions of it. Students at Stuyvesant High School, four blocks from ground zero in Manhattan, produced a special issue of their school newspaper (which The New York Times distributed to its readers in the metropolitan area) prominently featuring one of the poem's most familiar lines, "We must love one another or die."
Reasons for the poem's resonance are obvious, beginning with the month and day of its title, its New York setting and its evocation of how "the unmentionable odor of death/ Offends the September night." History "has driven a culture mad," the poem states; and although "blind skyscrapers use/Their full height to proclaim/The strength of Collective Man," there is no disguising the fragility of civilization: "Defenseless under the night/Our world in stupor lies."
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Many who recently found solace in "September 1, 1939" were aware of the poem's troubled history. They knew, for example, that Auden had declared himself unhappy with the very line now quoted so frequently, "We must love one another or die"; that he had tinkered with it; that he had then, for later editions, yanked out the whole stanza it concluded; and that he had finally renounced the entire poem as "infected with an incurable dishonesty." To the disappointment of admirers, the poem has been omitted from many collections of his work.
Lacking Auden's fuller explanation of this "incurable dishonesty," commentators have identified it with traces of sentimentality, preachiness or smugness that they detect in "September 1, 1939."
But The Times Literary Supplement's "Letter From New York" brought on serious charges of moral and political failure as well. A letter writer in the British journal called the poem "a meretricious piece of work" that, despite "its seductive cadences," should be "consigned to the scrapheap." In particular, he denounced the lines "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return" as "a ringing apologia for the Third Reich as the product of Versailles."
The reader also found "applause for Soviet Communism" in the poem's later references to "Imperialism's face/And the international wrong." To top things off, he judged the poem to be riddled with "snide remarks about America."
Another letter writer to The Times Literary Supplement pooh-poohed this "perverse reading" of the poem. Auden's references to cycles of violence and "international wrong," this reply maintained, are hardly alibis for Hitler or Stalin but age-old, undeniable truths about the human condition. As for "snide remarks about America," the respondent could find none.
Points well taken, and yet it cannot be denied that Auden, in his 1939 poem, viewed the coming of war through a mixture of conventional psychoanalytic and left-wing sentiments, and viewed America with a similarly conventional antipathy toward mass culture and politics.
Politics, whether democratic or dictatorial, are characterized in his poem as so much windy trash and rubbish. The "dense commuters" who stream into Manhattan's skyscrapers — "Repeating their morning vow;/`I will be true to the wife,/ I'll concentrate more on my work' " — are treated with at least as much condescension as compassion.
One suspects that these characterizations would earn sharp rebukes if expressed in a poem titled "September 11, 2001." More important, would a contemporary version of the 1939 poem be found guilty of what has come to be labeled "moral equivalence"? Was Auden shifting moral responsibility from totalitarian evildoers to past misdeeds by those under attack and to a universal human egotism in which everyone was more or less equally complicit?
Would The New Republic, which first published Auden's poem in October 1939, today cite it in the "Idiocy Watch," the feature where the editors skewer what they consider egregiously softheaded responses to the war against terrorism?
This mini-controversy may say something about the post-September moral, intellectual and political climate. There is a new demand that ideas and language, especially about war and peace but also about religion and moral obligation, be precise and explicit. A pronouncement like "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return" might once have earned a passing nod; now it is put under pressure: Is it true? How true? Exactly what is it suggesting in the present circumstances?
In many respects, this heightened scrutiny is healthy. It wrings out sentimentality. It questions conventional wisdom, well-meaning phrases and opinions certified to generate applause.
But that greater scrutiny can also be dangerous and stultifying. It can be applied selectively. It can filter out valuable insights that unfortunately come crusted with clichés or inflated with exaggerations. It can dismiss intuitions that fly beneath the radar of clear and distinct propositions, even perhaps on the wings of a poem's multivalent images.
Were the Americans who seized on Auden's 1939 poem careless readers? Or were they right to find there personal and even historical truths about the nation's trauma that transcended any of the poem's debatable lines? Poetry demands both rigor of intellect and generosity of spirit. So, it seems, do perilous times.