Introduction: "September 1, 1939" is a poemy W. H. Auden written shortly after the
German invasion of Poland, which would mark the start of World War II. It was first
published in America Magazine, The New Republic issue of 18 October 1939, and in
book form in Auden's collection "Another Time." (1940) It is one of Auden's most
well-known poems, and widely considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th
century; ironically, however, the poet himself grew to despise it. Despite his disavowal of
the poem, "September 1, 1939" remains a text to which people turn in times of crisis,
including, famously, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Martin Luther, the
15th-century leader of the Protestant Reformation, before connecting it to another
individual, a “psychopathic” man born in “Linz”—Adolf Hitler.
More Information: Auden wrote the poem in the first days of World War II while
visiting the father of his lover Chester Kallman in New Jersey (according to a
communication of Kallman to friends). Even before printing the poem for the first time,
Auden deleted two stanzas from the latter section. The two stanzas are printed in
Edward Mendelson's Early Auden (1981). 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." He resolved to omit it from his further collections, and it
did not appear in his 1966 Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957. In 1955, he allowed
Oscar Williams to include it complete in The New Pocket Anthology of American
Verse. Later he allowed the poem to be reprinted only once, in a Penguin Books
anthology Poetry of the Thirties (1964), with a note saying about this and four other
early poems, "Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is
ashamed to have written." “September 1, 1939”, among other things, is the world’s
greatest zombie poem.
Structure: Auden’s poem consists of 99 lines, written in trimeters, divided into nine
11-line stanzas with a shifting rhyme scheme, each stanza being composed of just one
sentence.
Author's details: Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was an English-American poet.
One of the preeminent poets of his generation, Auden's work influenced many
contemporaries including Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice.
Major works include poems like "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," and the
book-length "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio." Auden's radical early works
were marked by a Marxist worldview, but after emigrating to the United States in 1939
his later poems explored religious themes. Awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1953,
Auden taught at Oxford and was renowned as a playwright, librettist, editor, and
essayist beyond his celebrated poetry.
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