He wrote it and then disliked it more and more over the balance of his life.

An excellent review, The Auden Poem Auden Hated: On ‘September 1, 1939’ by Terry Teachout.

September 1, 1939 has never been a favorite Auden poem for me. Indeed, I don't think I got around to reading till fifteen or twenty years ago. But like some books, some music, some poems it grows over time. I come to see more in it than I first did.

Never did Auden employ his gift of accessibility more effectively than in “September 1, 1939,” the poem he wrote immediately after Nazi Germany started World War II by invading Poland. Published in the New Republic that October, “September 1, 1939” contains within its nine 11-line trimetric stanzas more widely quoted phrases than any of Auden’s other poems. It was there that he called the ’30s “a low dishonest decade,” described the stunned members of his generation as “lost in a haunted wood, / Children afraid of the night / Who have never been happy or good,” and—most memorably—warned his readers that they “must love one another or die.”

“September 1, 1939” continues to be cited on appropriate occasions, most recently after 9/11, when it flew around the Internet at the speed of light.

Famously, Auden himself had a reverse trend. He wrote it and then disliked it more and more over the balance of his life.

But as Teachout observes:

But Auden made no secret of disliking it, going so far as to call it “the most dishonest poem I have ever written” in a 1967 letter and dismissing it as his “least favorite” of his own poems in a later interview with the Paris Review. He cut the entire eighth stanza (in which the line about the necessity to “love one another” appears) when he included “September 1, 1939” in his 1945 Collected Poems, and then said that it was “a damned lie” to say that “we must love one another or die” and changed “or” to “and.”

As a result of these varied negative feelings, the Auden scholar Edward Mendelsohn chose to omit “September 1, 1939” from the revised edition of Collected Poems he edited in 1976, three years after the poet’s death. Yet the original version continues to be read and quoted, even in preference to Auden’s own revised version. Indeed, it was included by Mendelsohn in the shorter volume of the poet’s Selected Verse he edited three years later, declaring “September 1, 1939” to be “memorable enough to survive all of Auden’s interference.”

Teachout concludes:

Instead, as Auden had already written in The Prolific and the Devourer, a prose work left incomplete and unpublished in the summer of 1939 and cited only in passing by Sansom, the only way to make the world “impossible for Hitlers” is to “unite thought and intention and treat others with love and as equals.” This is what he means when he writes that “Hunger allows no choice / To the citizen or the police; / We must love one another or die.”

One may take leave to doubt that the author of September 1, 1939, whose own politics, as can be gathered from the book, are standard-issue contemporary British left-liberalism, would find such a position tenable. Yet it is what the author of “September 1, 1939,” chastened by the failure of his own ventures into politics and bolstered by his embrace of Christian faith, very plainly espouses therein—and it is the reason the poem continues to speak to readers who, like Auden before them, “cannot swallow another mouthful” of the totalitarian ideologies with which the repeating cycles of history present them time and again.

“May I,” he cries in its last lines, “Beleaguered by the same / Negation and despair, / Show an affirming flame.” That he succeeded in doing so in “September 1, 1939” is the reason the poem survived all his attempts to mute or suppress it, and why successive generations of readers continue to turn to it in times of trial. It is, and will always be, an affirming flame of hope.

Love this type of article that renews and refreshes and points us back to which we are too practiced at overlooking.