POETS Day! WH Auden’s “September 1, 1939”
Photo by Herzi Pinki, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
This week’s POETS Day enemy de jour de week is streaming video, not for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing, but for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing and making us soft. Our leisure is lurching towards too accommodating. They are waging war against our sense of what it means to have an event. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch Knight Rider, you had to be on the couch at seven on a Friday night and turn the pliers to NBC or, and I swear this happened, your dad would tell you that it’s “No big deal,” because “They’ll re-run it over the summer.” Those were tough times, but we were tough kids; not like kids today, steeped in this post-anticipation dystopia where the universe virtually bends to their whims. What do millennials do with such a dulled sense of expectation, never to knowing the exquisite longing of flipping through the Sears Catalogue toy section? What’s it like to wake up Christmas morning to find there’s nothing left to unwrap? As P.J. O’Rourke wrote, instant credit killed the dry hump. Nobody saves up for anything anymore. They are raising a generation incapable of deferred enjoyment. So take a stand and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. It’s your life and your weekend so why should you wai… hold on… I…
This week’s POETS Day hero de jour de week is streaming video, not for…
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Roy Campbell despised W.H. Auden. I assume the feeling was reciprocated.
During the Spanish Civil War, Campbell and his family on occasion hid Carmelite Monks in his house in Toledo from Loyalist communists backed by Stalin. It was a sprawling house and the monks not only took refuge, but stowed church documents there. He risked his life, as well as the lives of his wife and daughters, in doing so.
On July 22, 1936, Republican militia murdered seventeen Carmelites in the streets, among them former guests of the Campbell house. Suspecting ties, militiamen searched though the home. The family, fearing such a possibility, was able to clean out crucifixes and icons from the house but there was no time to remove the trunk of papers from the monastery from the front hall. Peter Alexander, author of Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography wrote, “The search of the house was thorough, but though the militiamen leaned their rifles on the Carmelite trunk, they never thought of opening it.” Alexander points out that possession of a missal could have meant death. One of the communists found Campbell’s copy of The Divine Comedy and yelled “Italian!” and then quickly “Fascist!” Alexander again: “But Campbell, with admirable presence of mind, showed them some of his Russian novels, and so convinced them that he was neutral.”
It incensed Campbell that poets and intellectuals in England and elsewhere romanticized the Republican cause. In particular it was the “Auden Group,” as they were known, made up of Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis, that he disdained, referring to them collectively as MacSpaunday, as they praised from a safe distance the men who murdered his confessors.
For that he was branded a fascist, though he denied the charge. At a poetry reading, Spender called Campbell just that. He walked up on stage and punched him. So pervasive was the label that on reputation he was offered a position in the British Union of Fascists. Campbell refused, saying he fought Red Fascism and was “ready to fight Brown or Black Fascism.”
Though he never saw combat, Campbell enlisted to fight Germany while MacSpaunday, I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the exact quote, “wrote from the safety of the fireside desks in remote country homes or far afield in North America,” about the moral necessity of taking the fight to Hitler. Meanwhile, whether accurate or not, the fascist label stuck with Campbell and his work was shunned, blacklisted from anthologies.
Tolkien listed, accurately but maybe naively, Campbell’s anti-fascist resume before concluding of the man on whom he partly based Aragorn, “However it is not possible to convey an impression of such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert. How unlike the Left – the ‘corduroy panzers’ who fled to America.”
MacSpaunday was unfair to Campbell.
References to America by Campbell and Tolkien were not-at-all veiled attacks on Auden, who moved to New York in January of 1939 as whispers in Europe grew louder.
Tolkien and Campbell were unfair to Auden.
For starters, Auden did spend time in Spain during the Civil War, and secondly, when war with Germany was declared, he offered to enlist but was told that from his age cohort, only those with specific skills were required.
He’s considered among the three greats, with Yeats and Eliot, of the twentieth century. Regular readers aghast that I didn’t say “four greats” and include Pound are simply impatient, because I would include Pound and think it’s a crime that everyone doesn’t. So when I say that the “corduroy panzer” charge followed him, I mean that it followed him in that it’s occasionally mentioned but overshadowed by his poetic achievements. He’s the inversion of Campbell in that regard.
It may be that the charge follows him due to the popularity of “September 1, 1939.”
It was written, as the title implies, after the Germans invaded Poland and was meant to call to mind last week’s POETS Day poem by Yeats, “Easter, 1916.” There are some obvious parallels between the two. They both have momentous dates marking political upheaval requiring action, and they both are written in loose (very loose) iambic trimeter.
I’ve been told by several web sites that “September” is meant to “echo” – they all say “echo” – the stanzas of “Easter” but I have trouble seeing the connections. “Easter” is a four stanza poem, two of sixteen lines and two of twenty-four, to mark the date of the Easter uprising: 4/24/16 or as Yeats would likely write it, 24/4/16. “September” has nine stanzas of eleven lines. I’ve checked for a more expansive definition of stanza, but three references confirm mine. I don’t hear the echo.
Prosody aside, the major difference in these popularly linked poems is one of tone. Yeats’ notes a change in resolve whereas Auden’s lectures “We are better than this.”
There are four things to keep in mind when reading “September 1, 1939.” First, from the poet John G. Blair:
In none of [Auden’s] poems can one feel sure that the speaker is Auden himself. In the course of his career he has demonstrated impressive facility in speaking through any sort of dramatic persona; accordingly, the choice of an intimate, personal tone does not imply the direct self-expression of the poet.
And then from Auden himself: “The integrity of a writer is more threatened by appeals to his social conscience, his political or religious convictions, than by appeals to his cupidity.”
Auden again, from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”:
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in: it survives.
Finally, Auden withdrew the poem from later collections. He did the same with his Spanish Civil War poem “Spain 1937.” Pulling the poems could be seen as an admission that he wrote without resolve when addressing Europe’s conflicts, a quiet confirmation of the corduroy slur which we know to be without merit.
I think it was simply that he felt the weight of the moment, the duty to satisfy his social conscience caused him to press forward with a poem that didn’t sit well with him. In retrospect he decided “poetry makes nothing happen,” and I’m well aware that treating the narrator of “September” as a persona while assuming that of “In Memory” is Auden is contradictory, but that hobgoblin doesn’t trouble me here.
It’s possible that he just grew to dislike the poem. You can finds hints that that may have been the case in this quote from Wikipedia: “In 1957, he wrote to the critic Laurence Lerner, “Between you and me, I loathe that poem.” I like it, but one of the problems of being a good poem by Auden is the comparisons to great poems by Auden.
William Logan, one of the most interesting critics writing today, wrote in the April 2023 issue of The New Criterion, that “September,” “perhaps should have ended with its contentious line, ‘We must love one another or die.’ (Auden soon thought the line a lie and dropped the stanza, later allowing it to be restored with ‘or die’ altered to the unhappy ‘and die,’ finally scrapping the whole thing.)” I think it should have ended with the stanza before ending in “Who can reach the deaf, / Who can speak for the dumb?” so losing the last two.
The opening is strong and the fifth stanza beginning “Faces along the bar” commends itself.
Wikipedia mentions that Penguin books put out an anthology titled Poetry of the Thirties in 1964. Auden allowed them to reprint “September 1, 1939” on the condition that it and four other of his poems appear with the note “Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”
I suspect most poets would thrill to be ashamed of this trash.
September 1, 1939
W.H. Auden (1907-1973)I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
