It was uncanny. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, a poem by W.H. Auden circulated widely by e-mail. With its references to skyscrapers, dazed citizens, and the approach of war, “September 1, 1939" seemed less a poem than a news bulletin. Edward Mendelson, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, who has edited several volumes of Auden’s works, discussed the poem with The Chronicle.
Q. Why did a poem written following the Nazi invasion of Poland suddenly feel so appropriate in the aftermath of September 11?
A. Not because it offers some Nostradamus-like prophecy of the later event, anyway! Everyone experiences great disasters uniquely, rather than through philosophical or moral abstractions. Auden is not giving you vague observations on disasters in general. Precisely because his poem is a complex, disturbed reaction to a major historical event, it helps makes sense of our own experience. The emotional impact comes from the personal details -- the poet sitting in the bar “uncertain and afraid,” the sudden intrusion of death into the autumn night.
Q. What did the disaster Auden responded to have in common with the one we experienced?
A. There is a shock of fear at the transformation of the world. Life seemed to be moving on a particular course, then suddenly it changed directions. Auden is writing about the end of confidence in progress -- the belief that progress will be not just possible but easy to achieve. He faces the discovery that all the rationality in the world couldn’t prevent this evil. In our case, Francis Fukayama had told us that history had come to an end, that everyone would ultimately come to accept the West as a fount of values. And September 11 pretty clearly demonstrated that they hadn’t.
Q. In later years, the author disavowed the poem, often with great passion. Why did Auden come to loathe “Sept. 1, 1939"?
A. Towards the end of the poem, he starts asking “Who can reach the deaf, / Who can speak for the dumb?” Then in the next stanza he says, “All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie.” The implication is, “Here I am, the poet, telling you the way things are, speaking some shining truth.” Later on, Auden had the sense that this was pure self-congratulation. He grew to despise the poem’s claim that he and his friends were “ironic points of light” who could show the world the way.
Q. But many readers feel that Auden really does show them the way -- especially with that often-repeated line, “We must love one another or die.”
A. That’s a paraphrase of a biblical text: “He that loveth not his brother abideth in death.” But in the context of the poem, Auden is saying that love is a biological need. If you don’t love, you will wither and die. It’s a whole-wheat sentiment. Auden found the idea repugnant later, when he came to see love as a moral problem, a matter of personal decision and commitment rather than something predetermined and necessary. It’s very resonant to say “We must love one another,” but not so easy to do.
Q. You have edited and written about Auden for many years. What do you think of “September 1, 1939"?
A. I read the poem and feel very moved by it. Yet in the back of my mind, I hear his voice pointing out what’s wrong with it. As his literary executor, I once asked him about the poem. All he said was, “I don’t want it to be reprinted in my lifetime.” He didn’t say he wanted “Sept. 1, 1939" to be completely unavailable, and I reprinted it in the Selected Poems. But he didn’t want to profit from it. In an interview, he once said, “It may be a good poem, but I shouldn’t have written it.”
Q. Be that as it may, I’m glad he did. “Defenceless under the night / Our world in stupor lies” -- those lines told you exactly what you were feeling.
A. Well, you know what Auden said in the poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” written a few months earlier: “The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
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