September 1, 1939

"September 1, 1939" is a poem by W. H. Auden written on the occasion of the outbreak of World War II. It was first published in The New Republic issue of 18 October 1939, and was first published in book form in Auden's collection Another Time (1940).

The poem deliberately echoes the stanza form of W. B. Yeats's "Easter, 1916", another poem about an important historical event; like Yeats' poem, Auden's moves from a description of historical failures and frustrations to a possible transformation in the present or future.

Until the two final stanzas, the poem briefly describes the social and personal pathology that has brought about the outbreak of war: first the historical development of Germany "from Luther until now", next the internal conflicts in every individual person that correspond to the external conflicts of the war. Much of the language and content of the poem echoes that of C. G. Jung's Psychology and Religion (1938).

The final two stanzas shift radically in tone and content, turning to the truth that the poet can tell, "We must love one another or die," and to the presence in the world of "the Just" who exchange messages of hope. The poem ends with the hope that the poet, like "the Just", can "show an affirming flame" in the midst of the disaster.

Auden wrote the poem in the first days of World War II while visiting the father of his lover Chester Kallman in New Jersey (according to a communication of Kallman to friends, see Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 531). Dorothy Farnan, Kallman's father's second wife, in her biography Auden in Love (1984), wrote that it was written in the Dizzy Club, an alleged gay bar in New York City, as if the statement in the first two lines, "I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street," were literal fact and not conventional poetic fiction (she had not met Kallman or Auden at the time).

Even before printing the poem for the first time, Auden deleted two stanzas from the latter section, one of them proclaiming his faith in an inevitable "education of man" away from war and division. The two stanzas are printed in Edward Mendelson's Early Auden (1981).

...
Wikipedia