In What WH Auden Can Do For You, Alexander McCall Smith talks about a number of Auden's poems, including "September 1". He says:
"Auden in general speaks to the more mature mind, but the raw sorrow and sense of loss that this poem conveys spoke to a young audience that had probably never heard of him. And the same might be said of “September 1, 1939,” another poem that touched the public imagination so vividly. That poem was photocopied and faxed around New York in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade towers. I suspect that many of the recipients similarly had never encountered Auden but were profoundly touched by the gentle resignation of many of the lines of that poem." (28).
The poem, among others, had a resurgance of popularity after 9/11 - it was read by Scott Simon on NPR on September 15th, 2001 (the media is no longer avalaible in anything but archive formats) and quoted by him in an article on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2011.
Stephen Burt, in his article "September 1, 1939" Revisited: Or, Poetry, Politics, and the Idea of the Public", notes more concrete numbers - he says that four newspapers reprinted Auden's words from the poem, and that it appeared more often than any other. He suggests that it is because
"September 1, 1939" represents one mind, and many minds, united by a civic emergency, by illimitable apprehension, by a newly evident international enemy, and by the sudden, urgent, and disquietingly general search for an explanation-not just any ex- planation, but one that uses data we already have. It gropes for ap- propriate response to "evil," while resorting neither to bellicose nor to confidently pacifist rhetoric, enunciating instead a sus- tained uncertainty. The poem speaks at once to our feeling of cat- astrophic helplessness and, in its middle stanzas, to the under- standable feeling that when anything bad happens to us (or to our society) it could be partly our fault. Moreover, it uses that feeling to claim that its resources, poetry's resources, have at this time a special civic purpose: they can enunciate a collective confession and thus draw the just, the ironic light-bearers, together for good. (537).
He adds that the problem Auden found with the poem was that "September 1" and "Spain" -
"encourage us to conflate figurative or emotional change with the practical changes required elsewhere in the world and to confuse our knowledge about the first with knowledge we may not have about the second."
Auden, as Mendelson says, rejected the poems 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."
So one of the points that readers took comfort in - that they are among the "Just", with the poet - is one of the lines that Auden dissaproved of.
"Auden in general speaks to the more mature mind, but the raw sorrow and sense of loss that this poem conveys spoke to a young audience that had probably never heard of him. And the same might be said of “September 1, 1939,” another poem that touched the public imagination so vividly. That poem was photocopied and faxed around New York in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade towers. I suspect that many of the recipients similarly had never encountered Auden but were profoundly touched by the gentle resignation of many of the lines of that poem." (28).
The poem, among others, had a resurgance of popularity after 9/11 - it was read by Scott Simon on NPR on September 15th, 2001 (the media is no longer avalaible in anything but archive formats) and quoted by him in an article on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2011.
Stephen Burt, in his article "September 1, 1939" Revisited: Or, Poetry, Politics, and the Idea of the Public", notes more concrete numbers - he says that four newspapers reprinted Auden's words from the poem, and that it appeared more often than any other. He suggests that it is because
"September 1, 1939" represents one mind, and many minds, united by a civic emergency, by illimitable apprehension, by a newly evident international enemy, and by the sudden, urgent, and disquietingly general search for an explanation-not just any ex- planation, but one that uses data we already have. It gropes for ap- propriate response to "evil," while resorting neither to bellicose nor to confidently pacifist rhetoric, enunciating instead a sus- tained uncertainty. The poem speaks at once to our feeling of cat- astrophic helplessness and, in its middle stanzas, to the under- standable feeling that when anything bad happens to us (or to our society) it could be partly our fault. Moreover, it uses that feeling to claim that its resources, poetry's resources, have at this time a special civic purpose: they can enunciate a collective confession and thus draw the just, the ironic light-bearers, together for good. (537).
He adds that the problem Auden found with the poem was that "September 1" and "Spain" -
"encourage us to conflate figurative or emotional change with the practical changes required elsewhere in the world and to confuse our knowledge about the first with knowledge we may not have about the second."
Auden, as Mendelson says, rejected the poems 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."
So one of the points that readers took comfort in - that they are among the "Just", with the poet - is one of the lines that Auden dissaproved of.
