Soon after writing the poem, Auden began to turn away from it, apparently because he found it self-flattering to himself and to his readers. When he reprinted the poem 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 (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 with the most famous line altered 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.”