But as for the stanza’s last crucial line, ‘We must love one another or die’:
No.
Just, no.
*
My notes relating to this line are too many.
‘Love’s limits are ample and great,’ writes the very ample and great Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘and a spacious walk it hath.’ My marginal notes on these seven words direct me to three manila folders on the shelf, containing years of notes on everything from A Lover’s Discourse to Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Pride and Prejudice, The Allegory of Love, Love in the Western World, Love in the Time of Cholera, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Dr Zhivago, Madame Bovary … I have notes on falling in love, falling out of love, making love, forbidden love, love found, love lost, lovers’ quarrels …
What did I ever think I was going to do with all this stuff?
It is – my God! – it’s trash.
*
‘Rereading a poem of mine,’ wrote Auden in his foreword to Barry Bloomfield’s vast Bibliography (1964) of his work, ‘“1st September 1939”, after it had been published, I came to 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 realised, was infected with an incurable dishonesty – and must be scrapped.’
*
Auden’s brisk, surgical account of his revisions of the poem are both entertaining and misleading. As we know, throughout his career he took a stern approach to his own previous work, often rewriting and revising poems according to his changing ideas and – sometimes – in response to criticism from others.
His poem ‘Spain 1937’ is a famous example. First published in May 1937 as a five-page pamphlet, with the royalties from the sale going to the British Medical Committee in Spain, the poem had been written by Auden shortly after his return from Spain. In 1940, George Orwell wrote an essay in which he strongly objected to a line in the poem, ‘The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’, claiming that such a comment could only have been written ‘by a person to whom murder is at most a word’. He went on, ‘Mr. Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.’ Though objecting strongly to Orwell’s criticism – he complained to friends that it was ‘deeply unjust’ – Auden nonetheless pulled the trigger on the controversial line. When he included ‘Spain 1937’ in Another Time (1940), he replaced the phrase ‘necessary murder’ with the more neutral ‘fact of murder’, and later still he refused to include the poem in any further editions of his work.
This sort of radical self-editing and meddling might be regarded as either valiant or deeply arrogant. Or perhaps both: courage often requires arrogance, if not vice versa.
*
But ‘September 1, 1939’ is a special case. ‘September 1, 1939’ is unlike any of the other poems that Auden revised. It is undoubtedly the most famous example in literary history of a writer attempting to revise his work, and of readers refusing to allow it. (Not only is it the most famous example; I can think of no other example. Again, you’ll be sure to let me know.)
Auden may have attempted to hack up the poem and destroy it – but readers have saved it from dismemberment and death, time and time again, rediscovering it, reclaiming it.
The poem – and this phrase, ‘We must love one another or die’, in particular – won’t die and never will, because people want it to be true.
The classic and unarguable objection to the line, of course, is that we die anyway. But the phrase simply can’t be killed off.
‘September 1, 1939’, among other things, is the world’s greatest zombie poem.
*
Auden was found dead in his hotel room in Vienna on 29 September 1973. Chester Kallman’s stony and sinuous valedictory poem for the poet shudders into life at the discovery of his body: ‘I found him dead / Turning icy-blue on a hotel bed’. Even those who were not as close to Auden as Kallman described the burden of readjusting to his death as a matter of physical necessity, the body of their language having consciously to reclothe itself in mourning: ‘Suddenly, unexpectedly, we need the past tense,’ wrote Clive James; ‘He was a great poet,’ wrote Joseph Brodsky, ‘(the only thing that’s wrong with this sentence is its tense […]).’
In the way of such things, in death Auden was instantly granted his immortality: according to the Times obituary, ‘W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry, who has died at the age of 66, emerges finally as its undisputed master.’
Why this desire in all of us that, after we have disappeared, the thoughts of the living shall now and again dwell upon our name? Our name. Anonymous immortality we cannot even escape. The consequences of our lives and actions can no more be erased than they can be identified and duly labelled – to our honour or our shame.
‘The poor ye have always with you.’ The dead, too.
(Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings)
Auden’s poetry haunts us because it seems to provide simple answers to individuals and cultures at times of crisis. This has happened a few times now – which makes it look like more than coincidence.
Let’s take just a couple of examples.
‘Dead poet is groovy due to hit movie’
(The Sun, 27 May 1994)
The 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral was a box-office hit in which Auden’s poem ‘Funeral Blues’ was read as an oration at the funeral of a gay character, played by Simon Callow. Faber and Faber published a small paperback of ten of Auden’s poems, titled Tell Me the Truth About Love, to coincide with the release of the film. There were reports of sales of over 275,000 copies, and Faber even decided to produce a long-awaited paperback edition of the Collected Poems. Some people were cynical about such profiteering: the Guardian’s Diary (11 June 1994), for example, described it as ‘a brilliantly circular scam – the book of the film of the poem from a book’. But the cynicism missed the point, as the poet James Fenton recognised in his analysis of the film’s popularity:
It seems that a large number of people, since the Aids epidemic, have become familiar with the experience of funerals at which a devastated boyfriend has to pay tribute to his prematurely dead lover. Though the death of the Callow character is actually caused by a heart attack, the emotional scene that ensues gains force from those kind of memories. So Auden’s poem found an audience which needed it – nearly 60 years after its composition. Auden would have been surprised, and, I think, touched at the outcome.
(James Fenton, ‘Four weddings and a circle of poetry’, The Independent, 30 May 1994)
*
The period 1979 to 1997 saw almost eighteen years of Conservative Party rule in Britain, which might be described as a crisis of another kind, and was certainly seen as such by the poet Glyn Maxwell, who on reading Auden’s The Orators in 1989 was amazed to discover its relevance:
A world where doctors and headmasters elbow to market; where material wealth is the index of human value, and the quicker it’s achieved, the greater the honour; where the publication of pornography, propaganda, suicide notes or glimpses of the erogenous zones of well-known people are cherished freedoms; where good health and water are sold to the people as two good things; where bystanders are framed by policemen; where furious conviction is rewarded by power or imprisonment but nothing else; where a Prince, concerned with his country’s poverty, is asked to mind his own business, and a Bishop branded political for the same reason; and – well, just as strange.
(Glyn Maxwell, ‘Echoes of The Orators’)
During the early 1990s, history also seemed to be repeating itself in Bosnia, and Auden’s voice could be heard echoing throughout the 1993 anthology Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia: in Michael Hulse’s ‘In Defence of Making Nothing Happen’, James Sutherland-Smith’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited’ and Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Bosnia Tune’.
*
And we have already discussed the impact of ‘September 1, 1939’ after the events of 9/11.
*
Auden’s words – and not always his best words, his finest words – have become part of the conversation of mankind.
As I understand it, the only apology for poetry worth considering is one which seeks to discern the place and quality of the voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind – a conversation where each voice speaks in its own idiom, where from time to time one voice may speak louder than others, but where none has natural superiority, let alone primacy. The proper context in which to consider poetic utterance, and indeed every other mode of utterance, is not a ‘society’ engaged in practical enterprise, nor one devoted to scientific enquiry; it is this society of conversationists.
(Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind)