" The Unknown Citizen"
By W. H. Auden
" The Unknown Citizen" is one of Auden's most famous poems; it is taught almost all over the world in colleges interested in Humanities. The phrase " Unknown Soldier" is often used by governments to commemorate those soldiers who die in battle and whose identities are not known for the rest of the army.
The phrase as such , praises the unknown soldiers and not denounces them. A striking technical feature of the poem is that although the lines are almost rhymed, yet the rhyming couplets are not heroic couplets. A " heroic couplet" is a couple of lines that are written in iambic pentameter with a very strong smart thought. The poet intends this for a purpose: he is not writing about a hero or a heroic soldier who dies at the battlefield. The title of the poem is therefore a satirical one and the whole poem describes the black comedy of the human life and Man's superficial details in Modern Society. We are in front of a citizen who is never measured by his humanity or emotions etc, but simply by " statistics" as if he was a part of a large computer program. He is not more than a digit in a bigger and a huger data collection. The poet tells us that the citizen of the poem is so straight that no complaint is ever filed against him. He has spent his whole life like a saint, so good and devoid of any misconduct. Instead of taking care of himself and of family, he cares for " the Greater Community" instead. He works in a factory named Fudge Motors Inc, where his employers are very happy with him as he does his job perfectly.
For the Labour Union, this citizen is a committed one and he pays taxes and other fees. He is normal in that he drinks and has no psychological complexes at all. He reads a paper everyday which is a sign that he is a normal citizen too. He has insurance plans and he never gets to hospital in his entire life except once and gets cure then. As a " Modern Man ", he owns what other men do, like a phonograph, a radio, a car and a fridge. Above all, this citizen is a man of peace when his country is at peace and a man of war when his country is at war. This means that he is a good citizen according to modern criteria of good citizenship. To be accurate, the poet tells us that this citizen is married and he has five children which is the exact number of children his government allows for married couples. This citizen sends all his children to public schools and never interferes in their schooling; he never criticizes public education.
All this data-collection about a single man is produced by government agencies ( Bureau of Statistics, Labour Union, Social Psychology Workers, The Press, Bank Policies, Health Insurance Companies, etc) and not by the citizen himself. This means that he has been watched all his life by these government agencies like a tiny insect in a big lab. Nobody asks whether he is sad or not, whether he has family problems or not , whether he loves or not. Therefore, the poet raises this question which belongs to humanity rather than to mere data. Auden's question is so clever that it forces us to go back and read the poem again to find out an answer to that question, " Was he free? Was he happy? ". This question, the poet says, is meaningless and "absurd" as no government agency collects data about how the citizens actually feel in their societies. No government does!
Here, the title of the poem confirms itself as really satirical because the word " Unknown" is used to describe brave distinguished soldiers, yet the citizen of the poem neither great, brave or distinguished at all. Nothing dramatic or attractive in his life. He is just one citizen among millions of other citizens who are looked at as a machine or an unfeeling robot.
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