Another Time was published by Random House in February 1940, shortly after Auden’s emigration to the United States, and it contains three poems that are among the most anthologized in the English language: “September 1, 1939,” “Musée des Beaux Arts,” and “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” Any one of these would make the collection essential; together, they constitute one of the great concentrations of major lyric poetry in a single volume.
The Poems
“September 1, 1939” opens in “one of the dives on Fifty-Second Street” as Hitler invades Poland. Its closing stanza — “We must love one another or die” — became one of the defining statements of the wartime era. Auden later repudiated the poem (calling the line dishonest — “we die anyway”), attempted to revise it, and finally tried to suppress it entirely. It remained irrepressible.
“Musée des Beaux Arts” meditates on Breughel’s Icarus — on how suffering takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window. Its opening — “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters” — is one of those phrases that has passed beyond literature into common speech.
“In Memory of W.B. Yeats” is Auden’s finest elegy and one of the great poems about what poetry can and cannot do. “Poetry makes nothing happen” — the line is endlessly quoted, usually out of context. What poetry does, Auden argues, is “survive / In the valley of its making” — it persists as a way of feeling, a form of attention, a mode of being human.
Beyond these three monuments, the collection includes “Refugee Blues,” “The Unknown Citizen,” “Law Like Love,” “Lay your sleeping head, my love,” and dozens of other lyrics that would be the crown of any lesser poet’s output.
Context
Another Time marks a hinge point in Auden’s career. Many of the poems were written in England before his departure in January 1939; others were written in the first months in New York. The collection thus straddles his English period (political, Marxist-inflected, publicly engaged) and his American period (more personal, increasingly Christian, formally classical). The tension between these modes gives the book its particular energy.
The emigration was enormously controversial. Auden and Isherwood leaving England just as war became inevitable struck many as desertion. Questions were raised in Parliament. Evelyn Waugh satirized them as “Parsnip and Pimpernel.” The controversy followed Auden for the rest of his life and permanently altered his reputation in England.
Collecting Another Time
First American edition (Random House, New York, 1940): Brick-red cloth binding with gold lettering on spine. Dust jacket designed by George Salter.
Identification points:
- “FIRST PRINTING” stated on copyright page
- Random House colophon on title page
- 117 pages
First UK edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1940): Published the same year. Blue cloth. Identical contents.
Market values: The American first in fine dust jacket brings $800–$2,000. The concentration of major poems — “September 1, 1939” alone guarantees permanent demand — makes this perhaps the most sought-after Auden first after Poems (1930).
Signed copies are scarce from this early period. When they appear, $3,000–$6,000. Auden was not yet the compulsive signer he became in later years.
The Faber first brings $400–$800 in jacket. Collectors generally prefer the American edition as the primary market publication (Auden was living in America by publication date), though the Faber edition has its partisans as the “home” imprint.