A shade less brutal and vulgar

"In 1966 Life magazine, planning a series of articles on the history of Rome, commissioned [Auden] to write six thousand words on the fall of the empire, for which he was offered ten thousand dollars, far more than he had ever receive before. After much labor and extensive reading, he prepared a typescript, titled "The Fall of Rome". It concluded with his 1947 poem "The Fall of Rome", preceded by a few paragraphs of reflection that make the same point that the poem had made about the fall of two civilizations:

I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don't mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to smash, and probably deserves to.

     Like the third century the twentieth is an age of stress and anxiety. In our case, it is not that our techniques are too primitive to cope with new problems, but the very fantastic success of our technology is creating a hideous, noisy, over-crowded world in which it id becoming increasingly difficult to lead a human life. In our reactions to this, one can see many | parallels to the third century. Instead of gnostics, we have existentialists, instead of desert hermits, heroin addicts and beats (who also, oddly enough, seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh, sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments, the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal and vulgar than that provided by the amphitheater, but only a shade, and may not be for long.

The editors of Life, unwilling to inflict anything of the kind on their millions of readers, asked Auden to rewrite it. He refused, as he had refused to rewrite his essay on Hammarskjöld. The essay was rejected and he was paid nothing."

E. Mendelson, in the introduction to W. H. Auden: Prose Volume V: 2963-1968 (pp. xxiv-xxv).