![]() In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, poetry-the most concentrated of verbal art forms-once again emerged as a vital, commemorative form. In 2001, on the cusp of another “low, dishonest decade," to use one of Auden’s terms for the 1930s, Auden was seen again as an indispensable poet of the age. ![]() Our language is peppered with his neologisms, not least the “Age of Anxiety,” defined in the OED as “a catch-phrase of any period characterised by anxiety or danger.” Auden’s lines are quoted, misquoted, appropriated, parodied, often without any attribution to the poet himself. Faber and Faber immediately cashed in with Tell me the truth about love, a pamphlet which sold a reputed 275,000 copies. One of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign ads included the signature line “We must love one another or die” from Auden’s poem “September I, 1939.” Two decades later, Auden’s lyric “Stop all the clocks” became the signature elegy of the AIDS era, and later made a cameo appearance in the 1994 romcom Four Weddings and a Funeral. The obituaries of the enfant terrible of poetry were detailed but rarely strayed from reflecting on his much-anthologised poems of the 1930s, “As I walked out one evening” and “Lullaby.”Īuden has always seemed ripe for quotation. Philip Larkin, for one, had dismissed his “rambling intellectual stew ” Randall Jarrell painted a sorry picture of a man “turned into a rhetoric mill, grinding away at the bottom of Limbo.” Jilted by his handsome younger lover, Chester Kallman, Auden took leave of all worldly pleasures, living out his last few years in a small town near Vienna. Morose and solitary, he described himself, in a poem of the early 1960s, as a “sulky 56,” who had “grown far too crotchety” and found a “change of meal-time utter hell.” In those later years, Auden seemed a shadow of his former self: his reputation had been tainted by some rather unforgiving reviews. As seen in my digital poster, a light source seen at the top of the Empire State Building contrasted with the dark figure sitting below fading in the smoke represents the hierarchy of privileged New Yorkers and non-Jews who are ignorant towards the wellbeing of Jewish refugees as they fade into the darkness, while the birds soaring freely above at a similar height as the building represents the unjust society in which animals are being treated at a higher standard as compared to humans.When Auden died in 1973, forty years ago last week, it would have been hard to imagine how popular he would become in the ensuing decades. “They had no politicians and sang at their ease, they weren’t the human race” emphasises on Hitler’s anti-Semitic policy which curbed German Jew’s, the nationality and religion of the narrator, freedom. The contrasting treatment of animals enhances isolation and marginalisation andĪ powerful line, “if we let them in, they will steal our daily bread’, particularly relevant as although this poem is more than 75 years old, the speakers struggle of marginalisation and being an outcast resonates with refugees today and how there are still wealthy countries who actively fighting to exclude them in the fear their ‘bread’ will be stolen. ‘Refugee Blues’ emphasises the contrast between the beauty of the natural world and the nefariousness which governments impose on citizens. ![]() The last two lines of the poem “Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard” is juxtaposition in regards to the overall tone of the poem which ![]() ![]() Irony and satirical context throughout the entirety of the poem depicts a one-sided nature of society and government through the ‘perfect citizen’. My visual representation illustrates a person evolving into a barcode representing the inadvertent result of conformality controlled by faceless the man above who is slightly faded to reflect the totalitarian government’s ambiguity. This displays the praise brought upon conformity as well as the making of a totalitarianism state where personal values and identity are tarnished. ‘The Unknown Citizen’ illustrates a society of brainwashed souls conforming to a general standard set by a faceless bureaucracy, “saint” a metaphoric term used to describe the unknown man in line four is not to be taken literally. Poetry itself does not make something happen, though, Auden’s subliminal power to inspire his audience to perceive with his views on the inflicting change among society. ![]()
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