![]() ![]() To this day, it doesn’t feature in his Collected Poems. what made Hitler into ‘A psychopathic god’.Īuden later disowned ‘September 1, 1939’, calling the rhetoric of the poem ‘too high-flown’ and dismissing it as ‘dishonest’, a ‘forgery’, and ‘trash’ which he was ‘ashamed to have written’. ![]() Linz is where Adolf Hitler was raised: ‘what occurred at Linz’ is a nod to the way that historians and biographers try to explain how ‘monsters’ are made by looking at what happened in that person’s childhood, i.e. The reference to Luther in the second stanza links what is going on in 1930s Germany under Hitler to the strong history of German Protestantism, stretching right back to the Reformation and Martin Luther (1483-1546), who started the Reformation in 1517. Some of the names and other references in Auden’s poem need glossing. ![]() In summary, throughout ‘September 1, 1939’ there’s a sense of the world lapsing back into barbarism and violence with Hitler’s attempt to expand the Nazi empire, and a feeling that whole nations have swallowed the manipulative rhetoric used by ‘dictators’ to bend people to their will. ![]() Like Yeats, Auden is aware that he is living through a watershed moment in history and is pondering what it means for the future: in Auden’s case, that what ‘Exiled Thucydides knew’ (writing about the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC) we ‘must suffer … all again’. ![]()
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