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In Shakespeare's first Henry IV play, one of the rebels against the king, a Welshman named Owen Glendower, lays claim to marvelous magical powers and supernatural gifts. His powers have been testified to from his conception; he is both a prophet and the object of prophecy. He begins by telling an assemblage of rebel leaders of the dramatic signs in the heavens that heralded his nativity:

… at my birth
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds
Were strangely clamorous to the frighted fields.
These signs have mark'd me extraordinary;
And all the courses of my life do show
I am not in the roll of common men.
Where is he living, clipp'd in with the sea
That chides the banks of England, Scotland, Wales,
Which calls me pupil, or hath read to me?
And bring him out that is but woman's son
Can trace me in the tedious ways of art
And hold me pace in deep experiments.

With these boasts young Harry Percy—Hotspur—has no patience. When Glendower resonantly proclaims, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," Hotspur replies, "Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?" When Glendower in turn replies, "Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command the devil," Hotspur's final answer is decisive:

And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil
By telling truth: tell truth and shame the devil.
If thou have power to raise him, bring him hither,
And I'll be sworn I have power to shame him hence.
O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!

Hotspur's counsel to Glendower is my counsel to all of us. Let it be my text and my meditation.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a particular poem came again and again to the public's attention—a poem by W. H. Auden called "September 1, 1939." On the Saturday after the attacks, Scott Simon read the poem aloud on National Public Radio; a friend of mine who teaches at the University of Virginia heard it declaimed at an interfaith prayer meeting; on October 11, the one-month anniversary of the attacks, The New Yorker magazine sponsored, program at New York's Town Hall called "Beyond Words" during which many writers read the work of others on relevant themes, and there the Irish poet Paul Muldoon read "September 1, 1939." (I find it ironic that a program entitled "Beyond Words" would be composed of nothing but words; surely during the course of the evening someone called attention to that irony, but the words kept coming all the same. For The New Yorker, nothing is ever truly beyond words.) There was even an article about the phenomenon, by Eric McHenry, posted on the online magazine Slate, but we'll get back to that later.

Such use of this particular poem was almost inevitable, given the presence of the month of September in the title, the poem's concern with a just-arrived world crisis, its association with New York City, and the popularity, among literarily educated Americans, of at least some of the sentiments the poem expresses. The first day of September in 1939 was of course the day on which Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and therefore—thanks to a mutual defense treaty Britain and France had signed with Poland—the beginning of the long-dreaded European war. In January of that year, Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood had come to America for an indefinite stay. (Both, as it turned out, would become American citizens and would live in this country for at least part of the year for the rest of their lives.) The two friends landed in New York, but Isherwood soon decamped for sunnier California; Auden, though, stayed, and soon found a house in Brooklyn where he lived with one of the most extraordinary assemblages of characters one could imagine: the great English composer Benjamin Britten, his lover the tenor Peter Pears, Thomas Mann's son Golo, the writers Paul and Jane Bowles, the young Southern novelist Carson McCullers, and, for a brief time anyway, the most famous of them all, the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. But Manhattan, then as now, was where most of the action was, and Auden spent a lot of time there; so his poem about the moment at which the European world collapsed begins with these words:

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