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

[Skip Fox]

Robin,

Yes. I quoted directly from the book. The Cardinal Giant edition published
1954, 4th printing (1957). So the issuance is 1954 or 1955. (A book can be
copyrighted in one year and published the next.) Williams' book is an old
anthology I just happen to have around. It went through many issues and
editions. I also have the newly revised third edition (after 23 printings of
the first) which contains the same line: "or die."


-----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 5:52 PM
To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue,Auden is Acid . .
. etc.

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 op-portunity 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 Anthol-ogy 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.


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