To what extent do you regard The Shield Of Achilles as characteristic E

To what extent do you regard The Shield Of Achilles as characteristic of Auden’s work as whole? At first glance Auden’s poem the ‘Shield of Achilles’ appears to be focused on the classical world. The poem’s classical nature is first indicated by the title- Achilles was of course a famous Greek hero, and throughout the poem there are further classical references, many of which Auden has taken from Book XVIII of Homer’s Iliad- ‘Marble well-governed cities’ (l.3), ‘†¦athletes at their games’ (l.46), ‘Hephaestos, hobbled away’ (l.61). However, the poem also combines these classical details with the modern world- ‘Proved by statistics’ (l.17), ‘Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot’ (l.31). Although there is this unusual combination of classical and modern, the poem can be seen as timeless: Column by column in a cloud of dust =================================== They marched away enduring a belief Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief. (‘The Shield of Achilles’ ll.21-23) Here the army who are ‘enduring a belief’ (l.21) that they are doing good can be as easily applicable to the modern day (i.e. the situation in Iraq) as to classical times. The timeless nature of the poem can be said to be a characteristic feature as it appears in other poems such as ‘Gare du Midi’: ====================================================================== †¦clutching a little case He walks out briskly to infect a city Whose terrible future may have just arrived. (‘Gare Du Midi’, ll.6-8) Here we are led to believe that a man is about to unleash a terrible weapon on a city and although the poem was written in December 1938, its proleptic nature allows the poem to be much more in tune with the w... ...atures, it is perhaps impossible to outline a characteristic Auden poem. ‘The Shield of Achilles’ lacks many features that would make it characteristic. For example, poems such as ‘Moon Landing’ and a ‘Walk After Dark’ are rife with colloquial (‘Mneh’- ‘Moon Landing’, ll.22) and recherchà © (‘Lacrimae rerum’- ‘A Walk After Dark’, l.30) language, whereas ‘ The Shield of Achilles has none, instead the language in the poem obeys the poem’s principle of contrast- it alternates between classical and modern language. Therefore it’s reasonable to say that there are many re-occurring themes throughout Auden’s poems, but not that there are entire poems which are ‘characteristic’. --------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] It is notable that ‘Ist September 1939’ appeared on many websites after the September 11th attacks in 2001.