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

[JforJames at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/5/2007 5:49:18 PM Eastern Standard Time,  
skip at louisiana.edu writes:

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.)



I have to agree with the speechwriter choice and Bob G who suggested that  
'and' 
makes the phrase trivial. 
Only with the 'or' could be have any polemical/politic/poetic sense. It's  
suprising that
Auden rejected it for failing on a basis of a logical truth. Plato  would 
have been proud of
him.
I half-remember a Pinsky quote from a early book, Explanation of America,  
something like,
'we're all dying, but the pace of it matters.'
Finnegan
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