W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...
written on the outbreak of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. It was first published in ''
The New Republic
''The New Republic'' is an American magazine of commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts. Founded in 1914 by several leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between "a liberalism centered in hum ...
'' issue of 18 October 1939, and in book form in Auden's collection ''
Another Time Another Time may refer to:
* ''Another Time'' (book), a 1940 book of poems by W. H. Auden
* ''Another Time'' (Jeff Williams album), 2011
* ''Another Time'' (Earth, Wind & Fire album), 1974
See also
* " Another Time (Andrew's Song)", a 2014 so ...
'' (1940).
Description
The poem deliberately echoes the
stanza
In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian language, Italian ''stanza'' , "room") is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or Indentation (typesetting), indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme scheme, rhyme and ...
form of
W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...
's " Easter, 1916", another poem about an important historical event; like Yeats' poem, Auden's moves from a description of historical failures and frustrations to a possible transformation in the present or future.
Until the two final
stanza
In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian language, Italian ''stanza'' , "room") is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or Indentation (typesetting), indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme scheme, rhyme and ...
s, the poem briefly describes the social and personal pathology that has brought about the outbreak of war: first the historical development of Germany "from
Luther
Luther may refer to:
People
* Martin Luther (1483–1546), German monk credited with initiating the Protestant Reformation
* Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), American minister and leader in the American civil rights movement
* Luther (give ...
until now", next the internal conflicts in every individual person that correspond to the external conflicts of the war. Much of the language and content of the poem echoes that of
C.G. Jung
Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, phi ...
's ''Psychology and Religion'' (1938).
The final two stanzas shift radically in tone and content, turning to the truth that the poet can tell, "We must love one another or die," and to the presence in the world of "the Just" who exchange messages of hope. The poem ends with the hope that the poet, like "the Just", can "show an affirming flame" in the midst of the disaster.
History of the text
Auden wrote the poem in the first days of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
while visiting the father of his lover
Chester Kallman
Chester Simon Kallman (January 7, 1921 – January 18, 1975) was an American poet, librettist, and translator, best known for collaborating with W. H. Auden on opera librettos for Igor Stravinsky and other composers.
Life
Kallman was born in ...
in
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...
(according to a communication of Kallman to friends, see Edward Mendelson, ''Later Auden'', p. 531). Dorothy Farnan, Kallman's father's second wife, in her biography ''Auden in Love'' (1984), wrote that it was written in the Dizzy Club, an alleged
gay bar
A gay bar is a drinking establishment that caters to an exclusively or predominantly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) clientele; the term ''gay'' is used as a broadly inclusive concept for LGBT communities.
Gay bars once served as ...
in New York City, as if the statement in the first two lines, "I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street," were literal fact and not conventional poetic fiction (she had not met Kallman or Auden at the time).
Even before printing the poem for the first time, Auden deleted two stanzas from the latter section, one of them proclaiming his faith in an inevitable "education of man" away from war and division. The two stanzas are printed in
Edward Mendelson
__NOTOC__
Edward Mendelson (born March 15, 1946) is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the auth ...
's ''Early Auden'' (1981).
Soon after writing the poem, Auden began to turn away from it, apparently because he found it flattering to himself and to his readers. When he reprinted the poem in ''The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden'' (1945) he omitted the famous stanza that ends "We must love one another or die." In 1957, he wrote to the critic Laurence Lerner, "Between you and me, I loathe that poem" (quoted in Edward Mendelson, ''Later Auden'', p. 478). He resolved to omit it from his further collections, and it did not appear in his 1966 ''Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957''.
In the mid-1950s Auden began to refuse permission to editors who asked to reprint the poem in anthologies. In 1955, he allowed Oscar Williams to include it complete in ''The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse'', but altered the most famous line to read "We must love one another and die." Later he allowed the poem to be reprinted only once, in a
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.
Reception
Despite Auden's disapproval, the poem became famous and widely popular.
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly ''A Room with a View'' (1908), ''Howards End'' (1910), and ''A Passage to India'' (1924). He also wrote numerous short stori ...
wrote, "Because he once wrote 'We must love one another or die' he can command me to follow him" (''Two Cheers for Democracy'', 1951).
A close echo of the line "We must love one another or die," spoken by
Lyndon Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice ...
in a recording of one of his speeches, was used in the famous Johnson campaign commercial " Daisy" during the
1964
Events January
* January 1 – The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dissolved.
* January 5 - In the first meeting between leaders of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches since the fifteenth century, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch ...
campaign. In the ad, the image of a young girl picks petals from a daisy, then is replaced by the image of a
nuclear explosion
A nuclear explosion is an explosion that occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from a high-speed nuclear reaction. The driving reaction may be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion or a multi-stage cascading combination of the two, t ...
, which serves as an apocalyptic backdrop to the audio of Johnson's speech. Johnson's version of the line, inserted into a speech by an unidentified speechwriter, was "We must either love each other, or we must die."
A reference to the poem titles
Larry Kramer
Laurence David Kramer (June 25, 1935May 27, 2020) was an American playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to Lo ...
's 1985 play ''
The Normal Heart
''The Normal Heart'' is a largely autobiographical play by Larry Kramer.
It focuses on the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City between 1981 and 1984, as seen through the eyes of writer/activist Ned Weeks, the gay founder of a promi ...
''.
In 2001, immediately after the
11 September 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commerc ...
, the poem was read (with many lines omitted) on
National Public Radio
National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other n ...
and was widely circulated and discussed for its relevance to recent events. Charles T. Matthews from the University of Virginia commented on the prescience of the 1939 poem reflecting the cultural sorrow experienced in response to 11 September by quotingCharles T. Matthews. ''Why Evil Exists''. The Teaching Company. 2011. the last two
couplet
A couplet is a pair of successive lines of metre in poetry. A couplet usually consists of two successive lines that rhyme and have the same metre. A couplet may be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal (or closed) couplet, each of the ...
s of Auden's third
stanza
In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian language, Italian ''stanza'' , "room") is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or Indentation (typesetting), indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme scheme, rhyme and ...
of the poem:
The American historian Paul N. Hehn used the phrase "A Low, Dishonest Decade" for the title of his book ''A Low, Dishonest Decade: The Great Powers, Eastern Europe, and the Economic Origins of World War II, 1930-1941'' (2002) in which he argues that "economic rivalries … formed the essential and primary cause of World War II."David O. Stowell Paul N. Hehn: 1927-2014 ''
American Historical Association
The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest professional association of historians in the United States and the largest such organization in the world. Founded in 1884, the AHA works to protect academic freedom, develop professional s ...