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

[Bob Grumman]

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

  I have Auden's problem with the orginal version but agree he it is much better than the revision, and close enough to logic for poetry--since it implies not that we will die but that we will die shortly, do to not loving one another.  But . . . how about, "we must love one another or soon die?"   Trouble with that is that it's not as sharp as the simple "or die."  Anyway, I very much empathize with Auden on this.

  --Bob  
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