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

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-----Original Message-----
From: JforJames at aol.com
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Sent: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 5:31 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Auden is Acid . . . etc.


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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