[New-Poetry] Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Auden is Acid . . . etc.

[Robin Hamilton]

Skip,

This doesn't quite correspond with what Mendelson says (p. 326) -- if I'm 
following it correctly, Williams and the editor of the 1955 text would seem 
to be the same, and the change *was made there.

(The 1955 date I gave in my earlier post was a guess at Mendelson's "ten 
years", so maybe 1954.  Or was the Williams anthology printed a year later 
in the UK?)

I'll paste in the appropriate bits from Mendelson.

Incidentally:

> Interestingly, Oscar Williams's _The Pocket Book of Modern Verse_ (1954)
> has
> the original stanza with "or," not "and." I wonder what happened there?

Do you have a copy of the above to hand?  I'm simply repeating Mendelson, 
who may have got the change wrong.  Or was the Williams text changed [back] 
to "or die" in a reprint after the first edition of the anthology?

Yeah, talk about a bibliographer's nightmare!  (Or goldmine, given the 
mileage Mendelson gets out of it.)

Robin

***********************************

" ... the stanza ends with a resonant affirmation: "We must love one another
or die." But a few years later Auden decided this too was a lie. He recalled
in 1964 that when he reread the poem after it was published, he came to this
line

<
[Auden] said to myself: "That's a damned lie! We must die anyway." So, in
the next edition, I altered it to

            We must love one another and die.

This didn't seem to do either; so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole
poem, I realised, was infected with an incurable dishonesty and must be
scrapped.*
>

<SNIP>

* For the record, the textual history was in fact more complicated than
this. Auden may have intended to use "and die" in a new edition, but by the
time he had an op­portunity to revise the text, for the 1945 Collected
Poetry, he dropped the whole stanza. The reading "and die" appeared ten
years later, in _The New Pocket Anthol­ogy of American Verse_, edited by
Oscar Williams; Williams asked to restore the omitted stanza, and Auden
agreed on condition that he make this change."

***************************************************

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Skip Fox" <skip at louisiana.edu>
To: "'NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views'"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 10:48 PM
Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue,Auden is Acid . .
. etc.


> Small addition: Humphrey Carpenter, in _W. H. Auden: A Biography_ writes
> that the editor of the 1955 edition "pleaded with Auden to let him include
> the entire text of the poem, [and that] Auden agreed, provided the reading
> 'We must love one another and die' was used." (ftnt 1, p. 331)
>
> Interestingly, Oscar Williams's _The Pocket Book of Modern Verse_ (1954)
> has
> the original stanza with "or," not "and." I wonder what happened there?
> (Maybe LBJ speechwriter had Williams' anthology at hand . . . it was quite
> popular after all.)
>
> Like Whitman, Auden is a textual editor's (and bibliographer's) nightmare.
>
> Again, Hamilton's was a fine post. It's always of value to cut through the
> misinformation no matter how good it sounds.