The Unknown Citizen
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The Unknown Citizen" is a poem written by W. H. Auden in 1939, shortly after he moved from England to the United States. The poem was first published in 1939 in The New Yorker, and first appeared in book form in Auden's collection Another Time (Random House, 1940).
The poem is the epitaph of a man identified only by a combination of letters and numbers somewhat like an American Social Security number ("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. The poem is implicitly the work of a government agency at some point in the future, when modern 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 method' strategy used by the state to judge his life cannot understand such questions.
According to Shmoop:
The manipulative "State" in Auden's poem celebrates "The Unknown Citizen" as the ideal citizen.
The epigraph 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.
