On September 1, 1939, a thirty-two year old from Birmingham, England, called Wystan Hugh Auden, found himself a stool at The Dizzy Bar, a shambolic gay haunt on Manhattan’s 52nd street. It would have been like any other evening of solitary drinking and writing for this disheveled lyrist, except that earlier on this day Nazi Germany had marched its war machine through the forest and into Poland, marking the start to six years of global catastrophe: the Second Great World War.

Why Auden was not home in Europe for this precipitous moment puzzled his compatriots. His departure was viewed as an abandonment at the very moment of great consequence when his countrymen might most need him. It cost his reputation dearly for a time. But young Auden — already a towering literary figure by this point — feared his gifts would be enlisted in a bellicose propaganda effort he wouldn’t have been much able to stomach.

There are poets whose arrival on the scene causes a rearrangement of the furniture of language. But then there are poets — we know them by names like Milton, Shakespeare, Blake, and, at last, Auden — who kick that very furniture out from under us, forcing a people to stand upright and notice the weight of the lives they carry. Like his major predecessors, Auden was a genuine master. He could bend poetic forms to his will with an ease that inspired decades of imitation both vain and unconscious: the villanelle (“If I Could Tell You”), the sestina (“Paysage Moralise”), the elegy (“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”), the sonnet (“In Time of War”), and so on.

And all this for someone who had no interest in poetry until a scholarship brought him to Oxford in 1925, with the sturdier plan to study biology. But this son of a physician and missionary nurse, with a deep interest in engineering and science, maintained that mental rigor in his verse. Auden is a deeply analytical poet whose acute powers of the brain did not leave him helpless in matters of the heart. Nor bereft of humor, for that matter. His emotional, intellectual and psychological range paired up intimidatingly with his technical virtuosity, proving him, in the words of Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Brodsky, “the greatest mind of the twentieth century.”

As Christopher Hitchens said, “Auden had three of the qualities that make poets immortal. He wrote beautifully about love, movingly about war, and he was witty.”

In the Dizzy Bar that fateful evening, Auden penned “September 1, 1939,” a modest, “affirming flame” that was all he could do to deny the darkness of the moment. Through it, Auden sought to remind a hostile world that “We must love one another or die.” Curiously, this was the line that caused Auden to disown the poem in later years (as he would do with other works like “Spain 1937”). He felt it silly and dishonest to have posed such a choice when, in the end, death visits us all, no matter the share or scope of our love. Rather, he thought, the line should read “We must love one another and die.”

Curious because this poem, in collaboration with the weight of those that came before it and after it until his too-early death in 1973, at the age of 66, betrayed an enormity of fellow feeling that has, indeed, rendered its maker immortal; a poet whose poetry — his affirming flame — has so far outlasted every shadow.