It’s not Auden’s best poem or (since “Funeral Blues” appeared in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral) his most famous. It’s not even one he cared for: “The most dishonest poem I have ever written” he called it, and after an abortive attempt at revision he eventually disowned it. But as Ian Sansom says “September 1, 1939” is “a poem that still reverberates with meaning and controversy, a poem that readers return to at times of personal and national crisis”. His richly entertaining book explores what goes on in the poem and why it has had such an impact. Having spent the past 25 years failing to write a magnum opus on Auden, he opts for something quirkier: a jaunt round 99 lines of verse. “I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street / Uncertain and afraid” the poem begins.
Poets can’t always be trusted when they say “I” but Auden’s diary confirms that he did indeed go to a bar (the Dizzy Club) that evening. As he sat there he may have been as troubled by a bad dream he’d had, of his lover Chester Kallman being unfaithful, as by the German invasion of Poland. Perhaps he also brooded on his abandonment of Europe for New York earlier that year, for which he’d been attacked in the UK. But such private anxieties went unspoken: nazism, Hitler, the threat to democracy and freedom – it’s the state of the world that preoccupies him over the poem’s nine stanzas.
His poem is public yet intimate – a feat so difficult to pull off that Sansom spends 300 pages trying to understand it
Continue reading...
