in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945) he omitted the famous stanza that ends "We must love one another or die." In 1957, he wrote to the critic Laurence Lerner, "Between you and me, I loathe that poem" (quoted in Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 478). He resolved to omit it from his further collections, and it did not appear in his 1966 Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957. In the mid-1950s Auden began to refuse permission to editors who asked to reprint the poem in anthologies. In 1955, he allowed Oscar Williams to include it complete in The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, but altered the most famous line to read "We must love one another and die." Later he allowed the poem to be reprinted only once, in a Penguin Books anthology Poetry of the Thirties (1964), with a note saying about this and four other early poems, "Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written." Reception Despite Auden's disapproval, the poem became famous and widely popular. E. M. Forster wrote, "Because he once wrote 'We must love one another or die' he can command me to follow him" (Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951). A close echo of the line "We must love one another or die," spoken by Lyndon Johnson in a recording of one of his speeches, was used in the famous Johnson campaign commercial "Daisy" during the 1964 campaign. In the ad, the image of a young girl picks petals from a daisy, then is replaced by the image of a nuclear explosion, which serves as an apocalyptic backdrop to the audio of Johnson's speech. Johnson's version of the line, inserted into a speech by an unidentified speechwriter, was "We must either love each other, or we must die." A reference to the poem titles Larry Kramer's 1985 play The Normal Heart. In 2001, immediately after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the poem was read (with many lines omitted) on National Public Radio and was widely circulated and discussed for its relevance to recent events. Charles T. Matthews from the University of Virginia commented on the prescience of the 1939 poem reflecting the cultural sorrow experienced in response to 11 September by quoting the last two couplets of Auden's third stanza of the poem: The American historian Paul N. Hehn used the phrase "A