Paper :- 107 Assignment

Topic :- W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”

Name :- Chandani Pandya

Paper :- The Twentieth Century Literature: From World War ll to the End of the Century.

Roll no. :- 06

Enrollment no. :- 3069206420200014

Email ID. :- pandyachandani11@gmail.Com

Batch :- 2020-2022 (MA. Sem:-2)

Submitted to :- S.B.Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

Biography of writer:-

On the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland by Germany and the opening of World War II, perhaps today presents the perfect time to revisit W.H. Auden’s famous poem, “September 1, 1939,” written in the immediate aftermath of those events. The piece appeared in The New Republic in October of 1939, and it was included in Auden’s 1940 collection of poetry, Another Time, published by Random House. Although this poem has been a favorite of many readers ever since, it received particular renewed attention in the days after September 11 in 2001, and not just for the uncanny superficial similarities in lines like the following: “The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night.”

However, we also know Auden became disenchanted with his own poem soon after its publication. Auden attempted editing the work from the very start, omitting a couple of stanzas even before its publication and later changing one of the poem’s most memorable lines, which Auden concluded displayed “dishonesty”: “We must love one another or die” became “We must love one another and die.” Auden eventually revised the poem by deleting the stanza containing that line. Finally, still unhappy with the language, he tried to limit reprinting of the poem altogether by refusing almost all requests for its inclusion in anthologies.

One reason for Auden’s change of heart about this poem could be a personal shift in political perspective on his part as he moved from England to the United States and drifted away from his earlier stance as one sympathetic to socialism, adopting more concern for religion as well. The poem also attracted criticism from some readers for what they perceived as too easy an explanation for horrible actions, if not an excuse for evil behavior, in lines such as the following: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

Nevertheless, as evidenced by the work’s enduring stature seventy years after its composition despite Auden’s attempts to erase it from his body of work, and as witnessed in the poem’s recent popularity after 9/11, most readers have responded well to the poetry, even if many apparently seem to misread some of its elements. As Adam Gopnik has written in The New Yorker (“The Double Man”: September 23, 2002): “‘September 1, 1939,’ far from being a call to renewed conscience after a period of drift, is actually a call to irony and apolitical retreat, a call not to answer any call. But, past a certain point, poets can’t be misread, not by an entire time, no more than an entire family can misread a father: the homecoming noises in the hallway are the man; the accumulated impression is the poet. What matters is the sound he makes. Auden’s emotional tone is our tone, even if his meanings are not always our meanings.”

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in 1907 to a well-educated father and strict Anglican mother. He grew up in a heavily industrial section of England. Science and religion heavily influences his poetry. His interest in science and engineering got him into Oxford University, but once he started taking classes his interests turned to literature. He graduated in 1928 with a degree in English. Auden then became a schoolteacher, and traveled throughout Europe in the 1930s, writing poetry about the wartorn political climate of the period. He moved to America in 1939, just before the start of World War II, and later became an American citizen. In America, he found his lifelong lover, a fellow poet Chester Kallman. His first book written in America contains “September 1, 1939” and many of his best-known poems (British and Irish Poets). He wrote many works while living in America, and in 1947 won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, which features characters living in New York during World War II. Because of his celebrated career, he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford University in 1956, so he went back to England to teach again, though he still traveled. He died in 1973 in Austria and was buried in the little town of Kirchstetten, and is now commemorated with a stone in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Auden wrote in times of political and economic turmoil, and his readers appreciated his timely response to the moral and political issues that affected them. He struck a chord with his poetry on the theme of escaping the anxiety of the age (Poetry Foundation). Auden’s biblical allusions are thought to be influenced by his reconversion to Christianity after he rejected it when he was fifteen years old. However, all inferences into his personal views are speculation because of his facility in speaking through any dramatic persona, so one cannot be sure the speaker is Auden himself (Poetry Foundation).

Analysis of the poem :-

W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” is about how people do not want to acknowledge the horrible injustices happening around them—when Auden wrote it, the war. Auden calls his generation “Children afraid of the night/ Who have never been happy or good” (54-55). As Baron Wormser says, “The poem is an essay that reviews the causes and background and prospects of war while remaining in touch with an actual setting” (418). Auden creates a recognizable dichotomy of the situation in which people lie to themselves by going about their day as if nothing is wrong when terrible events are taking place. While describing an ordinary scene, an ordinary day, the speaker injects a sense of wrongness. As people go to work or sit at a bar, they convince themselves that nothing in their lives will go wrong, that everything is normal, they “cling to their average day” (46).

Auden’s comparisons are drastic and accusatory. He compares Thucydides’s exile to the current state of democracy to show that tyranny rules again because Hitler was elected in Germany. Auden also compares Diaghilev’s unhealthy obsession with Nijinsky to the everyday person’s “crude wish” to “be loved alone” (66). These comparisons provide a harsh criticism of the everyday people’s ethics and morals. However, this comparison is one of the aspects about Auden’s poem that makes it so well-loved. S. Burt says that Auden “makes himself into his (guilty, anxious) readers’ perspective, trying to explain those feelings and their causes by reference to matters that we can look up” (535-536). Readers can see there is history of despicable people and events, but also how those events began and what ended them. So while World War II is starting, or, more recently, in the wake of the 9/11 attack, readers find a voice for their anxiety in Auden’s poetry. Burt argues that this poem speaks to exactly what people wants to hear in a moment of crisis: “It speaks with a single voice, a voice that moves gradually from almost abject fear to apothegmatic confidence” (535). Framing horrid current events in Auden’s stark, hyperbolic metaphors gives readers the sense of perspective they need to reconcile with what is happening around them.

The final, most important reason this poem is so well loved is that it provides an answer and a purpose to those who want change in the world and are repulsed by the blind, deaf, and dumb description in the beginning of the poem. A resounding promise comes at the end and gives the reader reassurance that there can be good in people, and that there is light in the darkness where the “Just exchange their messages”—“an affirming flame” (99). With these words, the speaker provides the answer to anxiety, he provides a reason and a solution. He describes people as “blind” in the “bright and darkened lands of the earth” and tells readers that “We must love one another or die” (35, 7-8, 88). This poetic statement is the solution to reader’s uncertainty that Auden touts in artistic form. He conveys the principle that in times of strife and uncertainty, people should show awareness and defy the injustice they see.

After its initial publication, Auden renounced this poem. Baron Wormser says, “he struck the poem as ‘the most dishonest poem I have ever written’ and labeled the line about love ‘a damned lie.’ In 1957 he told an interviewer that he ‘loathed the poem’” (418). Wormser remarks that no one likes statements that try to resolve what cannot be resolved (418). Auden wrote September 1, 1939 on that day, and the pure angst he feels shines through the poem. It was heat-of-the-moment writing that carried a dark and dramatic flair, which, while it resonates with anxious readers well, did not align with Auden’s retaken Christian beliefs. It is ironic, then, that the line quoted most often, “We must love one another or die” (88), is his most hated.

Surely, the George Bushes, Richard Cheneys, Tony Blairs, and Barack Obamas of the world perceived these “ironic points of light” tirelessly striving to forge a world free of imperial arrogance and domination. But Auden’s readers should understand that the awareness of the rulers is not enough to bring about this preferred end as they continue, unimpeded, invading new countries and bombing new “enemies”, invariably aided by the “folded lie” of newspapers and scholarly literature. For these reasons, Auden’s poem is a prescient work for our generation, a poem that compels the “affirming flame” of ordinary people to defy the “lie of Authority”, to choose the path of “Eros” before they decompose to dust.