Reattempted Auden Post

I wrote this last week and posted it, but somehow it didn't work, and I've not had time since then, so I'm trying again now. It will probably be a tad abridged.

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A theme I found in some of W. H. Auden's poetry was that of the depth of a person. At least two poems of his, in my mind, speak to the layered nature of human beings, and that a surface-level understanding of a person is insufficient to knowing him or her fully: "Who's Who" and "The Unknown Citizen."

"Who's Who," a sonnet separated into an octet and sextet, opens up saying that "A shilling life will give you all the facts." According to footnotery--yes, footnotery--a "shilling life" refers to a "cheap book or pamphlet," and the title apparently refers to a "book of capsule biographies of famous people." So although it cannot be ascertained from the poem about which person Auden is writing (if indeed he is writing about anyone in particular), the point is not the person's name. Stanza one essentially runs through a list of "struggles" ("How Father beat him, how he ran away") and achievements ("climbed new mountains; named a sea"). And, as the footnotes suggest the intention of the pamphlet is, readers are supposed to now have a biographical understanding of this particular person.

However, in the turn at line nine, Auden juxtaposes this superficial understanding of the person, and adds some additional, more personal insight: his habits, his ability to whistle, etcetera. These random piccadilloes, though perhaps insignificant, are the intimate qualities of a person which can only be known through experiencing that person. Though a "shilling life" can perhaps "give you all the facts," it does not give you a personality, a soul. Though it may describe someone, it cannot define them.

"The Unknown Citizen" is another excellent example of the juxtaposition between the superficial understanding of a person versus perhaps a "truer" sense of knowing a person. As opposed to "Who's Who," however, "The Unknown Citizen" is almost entirely composed of "the facts," save the last two lines. Almost in an exaggerated version of "Who's Who," Auden creates this exhaustive list of data on Citizen "JS/07/M/378." Almost everything that can seemingly be known about a person is on record: his conduct, war history, employment history, Union reports, congeniality, hospital records, even the appliances he owned were on file. Everything the unknown citizen did was documented, evaluated, and approved by the state. So he must have lived a good life, right?

In the final two lines of the poem, Auden writes:

"Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard."

This stark contrast, this satirical conclusion, displays how little the federal record of one's life, the "facts" of a census, can actually convey the depth of an individual or the type of life one leads.