W.H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was a British poet who moved to New York in 1939 and would live intermittently in the city through the end of his life. Next to Dylan Thomas, Auden is my favorite 20th century poet and two of his poems surface in The Twilight Prisoner. The first, "September 1, 1939", was written on the eve of World War II and was first published at the magazine I currently work for, The New Republic. When Jack meets Auden he is busy scribbling out a line from this poem, “We must love one another or die.”

Auden’s desecration of his own work is based on his real-life frustration with this poem—several years after he wrote it, he turned against it, describing it as rubbish and refusing to include it in later collections. He was particularly unhappy with the line “We must love one another or die” for the reasons he tells Jack and later amended it to “We must love one another and die.” Although Auden found much to dislike about his own poem, it grew to become one of his most famous and well-loved. A song of hope in the midst of darkness, it was often evoked in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.

The second poem that Auden quotes from while trying to comfort Euri is "The More Loving One." This deceptively simple poem weighs in on which side of love—lover or loved one—it’s better to be on. In The Twilight Prisoner, Jack, however, must figure out the answer to this tricky question himself.

On a final note, Auden’s request for a map of Iceland in the map room reflects his very real obsession with the country. He believed he had Icelandic heritage and even wrote a travel book about Iceland, which he visited in 1936.