The Unknown Citizen

The Unknown Citizen is a poem by W. H. Auden. It was published in 1939 in The New Yorker, shortly after Auden became an American citizen, and was first published in book form in 1940, in Auden's collection "Another Time". It is the epitaph of a man, identified only by a combination of letters and numbers ("JS/07/M/378"), who is described entirely in external terms: from the point of view of government organizations such as the fictional "Bureau of Statistics." The speaker of the poem concludes that the man had lived an entirely average, therefore exemplary, life. The poem is a satire of standardization at the expense of individualism. [Haffenden, John. "W.H. Auden." Routledge, 1997.] The poem is implicitly the work of a government agency at some point in the future, when modern trend bureaucratizing trends have reached the point where citizens are known by arbitrary numbers and letters, not personal names.

Interpretation

By describing the "average citizen" through the eyes of various government organizations, the poem criticizes standardization, and the modern state's relationship with its citizens. The last lines of the poem dismiss the questions of whether he was "free" or "happy", implicitly because the statistical methods used by the state to describe his life have no means of understanding such questions.

In addition, an epitaph to the Unknown Citizen is a parody of the symbolic Tomb of the Unknown Soldier commemorating unidentified soldiers; tombs of unknown soldiers were first created following the first World War. [Hewett, Ronald. "A Choice of Poets." London: Harrap, 1968.]

References

External links

* [http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15549 The Unknown Citizen; authorized text]