Preface
When I first encountered W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”, it was through a chain of Wikipedia links – fitting for a poem that should be examined through hypertext! I was maybe sixteen, and had somehow come to a page on the 20th century Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. The page said that he was referenced in a poem that I had never heard of by a poet I had never heard of, and, naturally, I followed the link. I may have stayed on the page for a minute and a half before I closed it in disgust. It was a nine-stanza, ninety-nine line piece that was frustratingly abstract, especially with what little I knew of the allusions in it – who was Thucydides, and what did he know about Democracy - what had happened at Linz – what had Nijinsky written about love, and what did Fifty-Second Street have to do with anything? I closed it and didn’t think of it again until the commercials for the movie production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart aired on HBO in 2014. I remember blurting out – I know that line! The title was from the same poem I had closed, even the passage I had skipped to – “what mad Nijinsky wrote/about Diaghilev/is true of the normal heart”. And I read the poem again.
“September 1”, on the surface, traces the causes of World War II. The poet claims to write it sitting in a dive bar on 52nd Street in New York – scholars trace this to being a gay bar called The Dizzy Club, that Auden wrote in his diary that he had visited on the night of September 1st. The news of the outbreak of World War II has spread, and the speaker, reflecting on that, traces the causes that have led “from Luther until now” to trigger the Second World War. As the poem goes on, it moves outward, spreading from direct political causes – Martin Luther’s antisemitism and its lasting effects, Hitler, and the end of World War I – to more general human events. He talks about the repeating cycle of history that has gone on from the Ancient Greek dictators, and how it will repeat, and moves from there into the human causes, saying that each person seeks “not universal love/but to be loved alone”. The speaker laments the repetitions of history – “we must suffer them all again”, he says, of the ills of dictatorship – but ends with an affirmation, that the voice of the poet may “show an affirming flame”.
One of the things that is most famous about the poem is Auden’s rejection of it. Edward Mendelson, the executor of his state, has written extensively on Auden’s work, and says that he stepped away from political and public poems in part because he did not trust how they allowed people to feel as though they were in the right – as if they are one of the “ironic points of light” that “flash out wherever the Just/exchange their messages”.
But the most famous line of the poem - “we must love one another or die” – is the one that is responsible for the number of variations of the text. After the publication of the poem in The New Republic on October 18, 1939, Auden made changes in an effort to correct what he saw as a dishonest line. For his 1945 Collected Poetry, he remove the entire stanza that the line concludes. In Oscar Williams’s The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse (1955), he re-wrote the line as “we must love one another and die”. Eventually, he refused publication of this poem (and several others) during his lifetime, with few exceptions. He did allow it to be published in the Robin Skelton’s 1964 Poetry of the Thirties, but he insisted that she include a disclaimer in the introduction – Skelton writes, “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.'"
Nevertheless, the poem has retained its force over people. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the poem had a resurgence of popularity - both for the details that became real in the days after 9/11 – “the unmentionable odor of death” more literally then “offend[ed] the September night” – and for the message of the poem, which culminates in two main statements: the speaker of the poem says “all I have is a voice/to undo the folded lie” and, of course, “we must love one another or die”. The struggle with uncertainty, the hollowness, the resignation and desire to resist – the ambiguity – have retained the power they had at the outbreak of World War II.
Auden draws on a multitude of references and sources in the poem, with wide-ranging allusions to other works. He based “September 1” on William Butler Yeats’s “Easter 1916”, and draws from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War and Vaslav Nijisnky’s Diary, and the Bible. He may also draw from John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester, and from Edward Gray, the First Viscount of Fallodon. He has inspired a number of others – Larry Kramer took the title of his play “The Normal Heart” from the poem, and requires that versions of the play produced now print two stanzas of the poem in the playbill. Alexander McCall Smith credits Auden with huge influences over his work. Variations of the poem have appeared in campaign ads, speeches, and other poems, like Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning”.
This tightly intertwined series of influences and those influenced by the poem are connected to each other through a central thread. Each asks and answers a question: what is the point of art, and what can a poet’s voice do? Auden struggled with this question in many of his poems, as did Yeats. Thucydides offered an explanation for why he wrote, as did Nijinsky. Larry Kramer demands that the writer take a stand to make change; Rochester, whose work Auden may allude to in one line, offends to startle the reader into realization or action; NPR quoted the poem after 9/11 to suggest the power of the voice. And Alexander McCall Smith, who claims that Auden has influenced him as a writer, writes about what the poet’s voice may do for a reader – Auden’s voice in particular. Hypertext is key to being able to trace these influences and the web of influences that spread from Auden’s poem.
The allusions are wide flung, reaching from the Ancient Greeks to a gay bar on 52nd Street and the September 1st invasion of Poland, and the sources are just as wide flung – what I have been able to compile here is only a fraction of the ways in which each could be explored in relation to one another. Hypertext allows the repeating themes – the repetition of history and the power of the poet – to be traced through a mass of sources that each offer an answer, answers that come together in the speaker of “September 1” or that expand forward from the poem. What is interesting is that many of those before Auden find history inevitable – many of those who come after insist that the repetition can be avoided. Hypertext leads to the understanding of the variety of meanings that come into the poem, and this is the most important aspect of being able to read it.
“September 1”, on the surface, traces the causes of World War II. The poet claims to write it sitting in a dive bar on 52nd Street in New York – scholars trace this to being a gay bar called The Dizzy Club, that Auden wrote in his diary that he had visited on the night of September 1st. The news of the outbreak of World War II has spread, and the speaker, reflecting on that, traces the causes that have led “from Luther until now” to trigger the Second World War. As the poem goes on, it moves outward, spreading from direct political causes – Martin Luther’s antisemitism and its lasting effects, Hitler, and the end of World War I – to more general human events. He talks about the repeating cycle of history that has gone on from the Ancient Greek dictators, and how it will repeat, and moves from there into the human causes, saying that each person seeks “not universal love/but to be loved alone”. The speaker laments the repetitions of history – “we must suffer them all again”, he says, of the ills of dictatorship – but ends with an affirmation, that the voice of the poet may “show an affirming flame”.
One of the things that is most famous about the poem is Auden’s rejection of it. Edward Mendelson, the executor of his state, has written extensively on Auden’s work, and says that he stepped away from political and public poems in part because he did not trust how they allowed people to feel as though they were in the right – as if they are one of the “ironic points of light” that “flash out wherever the Just/exchange their messages”.
But the most famous line of the poem - “we must love one another or die” – is the one that is responsible for the number of variations of the text. After the publication of the poem in The New Republic on October 18, 1939, Auden made changes in an effort to correct what he saw as a dishonest line. For his 1945 Collected Poetry, he remove the entire stanza that the line concludes. In Oscar Williams’s The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse (1955), he re-wrote the line as “we must love one another and die”. Eventually, he refused publication of this poem (and several others) during his lifetime, with few exceptions. He did allow it to be published in the Robin Skelton’s 1964 Poetry of the Thirties, but he insisted that she include a disclaimer in the introduction – Skelton writes, “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.'"
Nevertheless, the poem has retained its force over people. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the poem had a resurgence of popularity - both for the details that became real in the days after 9/11 – “the unmentionable odor of death” more literally then “offend[ed] the September night” – and for the message of the poem, which culminates in two main statements: the speaker of the poem says “all I have is a voice/to undo the folded lie” and, of course, “we must love one another or die”. The struggle with uncertainty, the hollowness, the resignation and desire to resist – the ambiguity – have retained the power they had at the outbreak of World War II.
Auden draws on a multitude of references and sources in the poem, with wide-ranging allusions to other works. He based “September 1” on William Butler Yeats’s “Easter 1916”, and draws from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War and Vaslav Nijisnky’s Diary, and the Bible. He may also draw from John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester, and from Edward Gray, the First Viscount of Fallodon. He has inspired a number of others – Larry Kramer took the title of his play “The Normal Heart” from the poem, and requires that versions of the play produced now print two stanzas of the poem in the playbill. Alexander McCall Smith credits Auden with huge influences over his work. Variations of the poem have appeared in campaign ads, speeches, and other poems, like Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning”.
This tightly intertwined series of influences and those influenced by the poem are connected to each other through a central thread. Each asks and answers a question: what is the point of art, and what can a poet’s voice do? Auden struggled with this question in many of his poems, as did Yeats. Thucydides offered an explanation for why he wrote, as did Nijinsky. Larry Kramer demands that the writer take a stand to make change; Rochester, whose work Auden may allude to in one line, offends to startle the reader into realization or action; NPR quoted the poem after 9/11 to suggest the power of the voice. And Alexander McCall Smith, who claims that Auden has influenced him as a writer, writes about what the poet’s voice may do for a reader – Auden’s voice in particular. Hypertext is key to being able to trace these influences and the web of influences that spread from Auden’s poem.
The allusions are wide flung, reaching from the Ancient Greeks to a gay bar on 52nd Street and the September 1st invasion of Poland, and the sources are just as wide flung – what I have been able to compile here is only a fraction of the ways in which each could be explored in relation to one another. Hypertext allows the repeating themes – the repetition of history and the power of the poet – to be traced through a mass of sources that each offer an answer, answers that come together in the speaker of “September 1” or that expand forward from the poem. What is interesting is that many of those before Auden find history inevitable – many of those who come after insist that the repetition can be avoided. Hypertext leads to the understanding of the variety of meanings that come into the poem, and this is the most important aspect of being able to read it.