Auden wrote “If I Could Tell You” in 1940, a time of great uncertainty and suffering for millions of people in Europe and throughout the world. At the time of the poem’s composition, World War II had already begun, with Britain and its allies declaring war on Nazi Germany in September 1939 after Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia (now known as the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and Poland. The war would last for six years, concluding with the surrender of Japan—one of the allies of Nazi Germany—in September 1945.

World War II was unprecedented in terms of both the scale of the conflict and the number of victims, both military and civilian. Estimates vary, but experts agree that tens of millions of people died, including several million victims of the Holocaust—a genocide committed against Jewish people and other groups of people labeled “undesirable” by the Nazi regime. The war was also notable for its brutality against civilian populations, with deliberate aerial bombings of cities well behind enemy lines, such as witnessed during the London Blitz from 1940-1941. The war also remains notorious for the USA’s use of atomic bombs against the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which led to the immediate deaths of over 200,000 civilians.