[New-Poetry] Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Auden is Acid, and Y'all Can Go Screw

[Skip Fox]

Great data, thanks. It confirmed what we had been thinking with great
detail.

-----Original Message-----
From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
[mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Robin Hamilton
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 3:43 PM
To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Auden is Acid,and
Y'all Can Go Screw

As usual, _The English Auden_ is pretty much lacking in necessary textual 
details -- did Edward Mendelson deliberately go out of his way to ensure you

have to consult every one of his books to get a full picture?  That gives 
the full originally-published text, with the poem noted as written in 
September 1939 and first published in book form in _Another Time_ (1940). 
Even Mendelson's biography, _Early Auden_ (see pp. 334 to 330) isn't 
entirely clear as to which was the last edition that Auden kept the poem in.

There, we're told that Auden included the poem, but with the entire stanza 
containing "We must love one another or die" omitted, in his _Collected 
Poetry_ (1945).  But in 1955, it +was+ reprinted in _The New Pocket 
Anthology of American Verse_, which printed the line as revised to "and die"

for the first time.  Presumably this is the last time Auden allows the poem 
to be reprinted before it joins the metaphorical bonfire of some of his best

pre-1940 work, along with "Spain" and the Kipling/Claudel stanzas in "In 
Memory of W.B.Yeats".

The deleted poems and stanzas are included in Mendelson's _Selected Poetry_ 
but not in his edition of Auden's _Collected Poetry_.

            <sigh>

Writing in 1964, retrospectively, Auden says he first revised "We must love 
one another or die" -- 'That's a damn lie!  We must die anyway' -- to "and 
die", then scrapped the whole poem on the grounds that it was, in his words,

'infected with an incurable dishonesty.'  (Mendelson, _Early Auden_, p. 
326.)

So well before LBJ expropriates it.

Where did LBJ's speechwriter pick up the line from anyway?  A first edition 
of _Another Time_ or the 1955 anthology?

Auden was less cutting, so to speak, with regard to his post-1940 poetry, 
though there is the case of the Amazing Vanishing Dildo in "In Praise of 
Limestone", and "A Platonic Blow" still isn't part of the formal Auden 
canon.

Robin Hamilton

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Skip Fox
To: 'NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views'
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 5:30 PM
Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Auden is Acid,and

Y'all Can Go Screw

The notes in Ellmann's anthology _The Norton Anthology of Modern and 
Contemporary Poetry_ are wrong on occasion, but I _did_ read this elsewhere 
as well:

"Auden later attempted to revise this line, which struck him as 'dishonest.'

In one revision, the line reads 'We must love one another and die.' Another 
version of the poem leaves out the entire stanza." (ftnt. #4, p. 803 in vol.

1).

I remember hearing he even dropped the entire poem in one version of his 
selected poetry, finding it unrevisable. 


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