Accept no substitutes

Questions – literary and other

Rereading Major Barbara and wondering how heroic and right Shaw thought Undershaft should be considered? Is Undershaft’s commitment to the previous Undershaft’s dreams and obligations a kind of trueness? And what of Cusins? Is his Greek a goodness or a dressing?

A friend asks for the “Auden poem with lines “We must love each other or die.” A line readers grew to love and a line that Auden grew to hate. First he changed “or” to “and” then he dropped the whole stanza. Then he dropped the poem from his Collected and completely disavowed it as untrue. Later after Auden’s death, the original poem, “September, 1939” was restored. How good was Auden’s sense of his own poetry?

Were we all goovier in the swinging 60s or only those Swinging Londoners like the Zombies?

1 Comment

  1. sally

    More on Auden’s line, including responses by Sven Birkerts as well as a bright undergraduate.

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