PAPERMAC, 1982, £4.95
ISBN: 0 333 329546
At the Great Writing Conference in London this summer, Kate Coles gave a talk on revision. She mentioned W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” and detailed Auden’s change from the famous line “We must love one another or die” to “We must love one another and die.”
When Kate told this anecdote, I realized I don’t know nearly enough about Auden or his work. After picking up W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet, I’ve gleaned a few things:
- Auden first changed that famous line, then cut the stanza altogether, and later pulled the poem entirely from his complete works. As Auden explained it, “The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty—and must be scrapped” (195). Many folks think Auden’s revisions didn’t make his poems better.
- Auden thought that a poem starts “in the guts and only flowers in the head” (96). That is, in order for a poem to work, the instinct has got to lead the intellect and not the other way around. The challenge of writing is that “just when the Daemon is going to speak, the Prig claps his hand over his mouth and edits it” (96). Amen.
- Reflecting back on his political poems, Auden believed that “Political social history would be no different if Dante, Michelangelo, Byron had never lived. The arts can’t do anything about this. Only political action and straight journalistic reportage can. I feel a little guilty,” he continued, “about some things I wrote in the thirties. Nothing I wrote against Hitler prevented one Jew being killed” (291). Here I thought about June Jordan’s Berkeley commencement speech, “Of Those So Close Beside Me, Which are You?” wherein she describes a party where Ralph Ellison had a similar revelation about the worth of his writing and then didn’t write much after that. June recalls his presence quieting the room when he asked the company to, “Look at Germany! All of that music, all of that poetry, and those novels and the paintings and did any of it ever stop a single Nazi from pushing a single human being into the oven?” Perhaps the arts won’t ever change politics. But I can’t imagine going through rough times without poetry and paintings and novels and music. Jordan says later in the essay, “I do not accept that immersion into our collective quest for things beautiful will cripple our own abilities to honor the right of all human beings to survive.” Yes. Poetry may not create the change, but it creates the balm. And we need both.
- Auden wrote a pornographic poem, “The Platonic Blow,” which was eventually published as a small booklet with drawings by Joe Brainard.