Auden disliked a number of his poems after publication. In the 1964 anthology Poetry of the Thirties, where he gave rare permission for several of his disliked poems to be reprinted, the editor, Robin Skelton, says in the introduction that she has been asked to say of these poems:
W.H. Auden has been monumentally generous in allowing me to use early texts of five poems of which he now dissaproves. These poems are "Sir, a No Man's Enemy", "A Communist to Others", "To a Writer on His Birthday", "Spain" and "September 1, 1939". I have agreed to make it absolutely clear that 'Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.'"
In "September 1", Auden specifically disliked the line "we must love one another or die". Edward Mendelson in Early Auden quotes Auden recalling what happened when he reread the poem after its original publication:
“[I] 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 whole stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty and must be scrapped.”
Those versions of the poem exist in printed versions. Auden’s altered version appears in Oscar William’s 1955 The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, where the line reads “we must love one another and die”. There is also the version from Auden’s 1945 Collected Poetry, where the whole stanza that concludes with the line was deleted. Mendelson also reprints two stanzas from the original typescript submitted to The New Republic, which were cut before publication (Mendelson 327-8).
To begin, one may wish to read the version printed in The New Republic, which is most often reprinted today. The original typescript, the 1945 version, and the 1955 version may be read after. A comparison of the four versions is provided here. The poem is available on poets.org.
Why did Auden dislike this poem? Mendelson, in "Revision and Power: The Example of W.H. Auden", says:
Auden...worked in his own acts of revision to balance the compulsion that he necessarily practiced on his words by renouncing any form of compulsion over his readers. The success of his power over words offered the temptation to use power over persons. So, when he revised his early drafts into publishable form, and, later, when he revised his published works for new editions, he repeatedly rejected his most compelling metaphors, and called attention to his own artifice. When he compiled his Collected Shorter Poems...he omitted the best-known public poems that he wrote in the 1930s, "Spain" and "September 1, 1939." He did not drop these poems because he disagreed with their politics-vaguely Marxist in the first poem, even more vaguely idealistic in the second-but because he distrusted their power to convince his readers that he and they were on the right side in the great struggles of the age, that they were "the just" who exchanged messages through "ironic points of light." Auden also wanted to drop his most popular love poem, "Lay your sleeping head, my love," apparently because it gave a romanticizing gloss to brief, unfaithful sexual love; but he was persuaded by friends to let the poem remain.
Mendelson goes on to say that Auden said: "In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." Mendelson adds that
"The difficulty of Auden's position, as he acknowledged, is that a poem that disenchants and disintoxicates-a poem that reminds its readers of the flaws not merely in their world but, above all, in themselves-may not be a poem that an audience will want to read. His solution to this difficulty was a dialectical one, in which the formal and verbal beauty of a poem is an analogy of the order and coherence of some ultimate goodness, while the poem simultaneously insists that its own order is a fiction, that it is "an analogy, not an imitation." A poem can never show how to reconcile contradictions in the world of time and experience, but it can present an analogy of reconciliation through its own formal and verbal order; in that limited realm, contradictory feelings, languages, tones, and voices are contained and reconciled." (106)
W.H. Auden has been monumentally generous in allowing me to use early texts of five poems of which he now dissaproves. These poems are "Sir, a No Man's Enemy", "A Communist to Others", "To a Writer on His Birthday", "Spain" and "September 1, 1939". I have agreed to make it absolutely clear that 'Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.'"
In "September 1", Auden specifically disliked the line "we must love one another or die". Edward Mendelson in Early Auden quotes Auden recalling what happened when he reread the poem after its original publication:
“[I] 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 whole stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty and must be scrapped.”
Those versions of the poem exist in printed versions. Auden’s altered version appears in Oscar William’s 1955 The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, where the line reads “we must love one another and die”. There is also the version from Auden’s 1945 Collected Poetry, where the whole stanza that concludes with the line was deleted. Mendelson also reprints two stanzas from the original typescript submitted to The New Republic, which were cut before publication (Mendelson 327-8).
To begin, one may wish to read the version printed in The New Republic, which is most often reprinted today. The original typescript, the 1945 version, and the 1955 version may be read after. A comparison of the four versions is provided here. The poem is available on poets.org.
Why did Auden dislike this poem? Mendelson, in "Revision and Power: The Example of W.H. Auden", says:
Auden...worked in his own acts of revision to balance the compulsion that he necessarily practiced on his words by renouncing any form of compulsion over his readers. The success of his power over words offered the temptation to use power over persons. So, when he revised his early drafts into publishable form, and, later, when he revised his published works for new editions, he repeatedly rejected his most compelling metaphors, and called attention to his own artifice. When he compiled his Collected Shorter Poems...he omitted the best-known public poems that he wrote in the 1930s, "Spain" and "September 1, 1939." He did not drop these poems because he disagreed with their politics-vaguely Marxist in the first poem, even more vaguely idealistic in the second-but because he distrusted their power to convince his readers that he and they were on the right side in the great struggles of the age, that they were "the just" who exchanged messages through "ironic points of light." Auden also wanted to drop his most popular love poem, "Lay your sleeping head, my love," apparently because it gave a romanticizing gloss to brief, unfaithful sexual love; but he was persuaded by friends to let the poem remain.
Mendelson goes on to say that Auden said: "In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." Mendelson adds that
"The difficulty of Auden's position, as he acknowledged, is that a poem that disenchants and disintoxicates-a poem that reminds its readers of the flaws not merely in their world but, above all, in themselves-may not be a poem that an audience will want to read. His solution to this difficulty was a dialectical one, in which the formal and verbal beauty of a poem is an analogy of the order and coherence of some ultimate goodness, while the poem simultaneously insists that its own order is a fiction, that it is "an analogy, not an imitation." A poem can never show how to reconcile contradictions in the world of time and experience, but it can present an analogy of reconciliation through its own formal and verbal order; in that limited realm, contradictory feelings, languages, tones, and voices are contained and reconciled." (106)