An idealist who experimented with Marx and Freud during the 1930s, Auden grew to hate politics but remained conscious of an individual’s place in the world order. When Nazi forces launched their invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, a poetic response by Auden was inevitable.
Origins
‘September 1, 1939’ is a poem that first appeared in the New Republic issue of October 18, 1939, and was included in Auden's 1940 collection Another Time. In terms of popularity, the work rivals his elegiac ‘Funeral Blues’ and ‘In Memory of W. B Yeats,’ but its history is far more problematic. As Auden’s political sentiments changed over time, ‘September 1, 1939’ underwent several revisions and was eventually disowned by its author.
Auden is said to have written ‘September 1, 1939’ at the New Jersey home of Chester Kallman’s father shortly after the war began. The poem consists of 99 lines, divided into nine stanzas of eleven lines each. Perhaps white-hot in conception, it does not have the meticulous structure of his other works and uses an inconsistent rhyming scheme. ‘September 1, 1939,’ however, is remarkable for its dark, foreboding atmosphere and vague sense of hope.
Bartender…
Auden’s poem is set in a Manhattan bar, assumingly on the day of Nazi Germany’s entrance into Poland. A feeling of menace is immediately conveyed by its speaker: ‘I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street / Uncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.’ The atmosphere is similar to Auden’s 1947 masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, but unlike the social communion found in that later poem, his 1939 protagonist is alone and helpless.
The second and third stanzas connect modern-day events with European history. Auden claims the persistent desire for war by Germany as a result of its distant troubles (‘Accurate scholarship can / Unearth the whole offence / From Luther until now / That has driven a culture mad’) and mocks the falsehoods by government worldwide. This deception has been long known to political theorists, including the Greek Thucydides, whom Auden mentions in line 23. Auden does not hide his contempt for bureaucrats, citing ‘the elderly rubbish’ spoken by dictators and the ‘mismanagement and grief’ that ‘we must suffer [ ] all again.’
Asleep in America
Attention now moves from Europe to the United States, which in 1939 was at a perceivably safe distance from the war. Auden, an Englishman who watched matters unfold in Europe, already knew that the U. S. could not remain neutral. Yet the country seemed to be living in ‘an euphoric dream.’ A connection is made between America’s distance from these events and people sitting comfortably around him in the bar. This feeling of comfort is illusory, ‘Lest we should see where we are, / Lost in a haunted wood.’ World democracy was under siege and the U. S., a world power, seemed to Auden incredibly complacent.
Well-written poetry draws some type of resolution from the given conflict. Auden searches for this after two further stanzas on the ignorance behind neutrality. In the closing passages, he tells of the poet’s duty to shatter illusions and clarify a person’s role in the world; Man is not a peon of government as its grandiose images lead us to believe, yet he is not free from social responsibility: ‘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.’ Here, Auden gives the individual value in a world that must function collectively, for the good of all. It was an idea that Auden clung to while Nazi tanks rolled across Eastern Europe.
‘September 1, 1939’ has remained well-known despite Auden’s grappling with the poem after its original publication. The famous tenth stanza was edited, cut down, and deleted completely in later printings before Auden suppressed the entire work. Still, the poem has been frequently anthologized and enjoyed wide distribution after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Auden’s poem is recognized for its dramatic impact and prevailing sense of community.
 |
