Modern

W. H. Auden

1907–1973

Poet who revised September 1, 1939

We must love one another or die is the line he later rejected as a lie, because we die anyway, and changed, in some printings, to or die as a person. The canon keeps the 1939 sentence and tells you he repented of it. Both facts are the poem’s history.

In the canon

  1. We must love one another or die.September 1, 1939

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