September 1, 1939

September 1, 1939 "September 1, 1939" is well known for having one of the most colorful histories of revision of any poem in W.H. Auden's canon. Auden had arrived in America from England on 26 january 1939, and many of his countrymen in Great Britain considered his move, coinciding with rumors of war, to be cowardly at least and perhaps even traitorous. From his newly adopted home Auden followed the troublesome events in Europe closely, and on 1 September 1939, the day that Hitler invaded Poland, Auden wrote out a draft of the poem. Within a year he was regularly attending Holy Communion in the Episcopal Church-his return to the Anglicanism of his childhood had been gradual-but his own distinctive Christian humanism lay behind the last and notorious line of the penultimate stanza: "We must love one another or die." Several years later Auden soberly pronounced the line "a damned lie," contending that one must die regardless of love; accordingly, in his Collected Poetry (1945) and Collected Shorter Poems (1950) the entire stanza in which the line appeared was deleted. In 1955, at the behest of an editor who wanted to reprint the complete poem, Auden changed the line to the more realistic, "We must love one another and die." He finally abandoned the poem altogether, however, and it was not included in Edward Mendelson's Collected Poems (1976). The original version of the poem reappeared for the first time in The English Auden (1977), which Mendelson edited, and is readily available in Selected Poems (1979), also edited by Mendelson.