The Unknown Citizen
by W. H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
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Themes:
The Unknown Citizen Theme of Identity
By definition, the Unknown Citizen has no identity. With the related concept of the Unknown Soldier, it is the soldier’s physical remains, or dead body, that cannot be identified. But for the Unknown Citizen, it is more that his life was so conventional that he did not distinguish himself in any way from his fellow citizens. There must be thousands, even millions, of Unknown Citizens out there, about whom little can be said except that they didn’t get in anyone’s way. On the other hand, you might think that there is nothing wrong with being "unknown," and that the poet is being elitist.
The Unknown Citizen Theme of Manipulation
Monuments and public celebrations are always political. Even your town’s Fourth of July parade is a staged political event. Now, "political" doesn’t have to have a negative connotation (who doesn’t love free candy and bead necklaces on the Fourth of July?), but in this poem, the State is a creepy, manipulative bureaucracy that is most concerned with preventing oddballs from getting in the way with the status quo. So they have created this expensive marble monument to the blandest person in the country, the one least likely to mess things up for those in power. The inscription on the monument – the poem – tells us almost nothing about the man to whom it is dedicated. It tries to convince the imaginary reader to be more like the Unknown Citizen.
The Unknown Citizen Theme of Patriotism
Some people say, "My country, right or wrong." Other people think argument and dissent are the signs of a true patriot. Auden’s poem falls more toward the latter end of the spectrum. The poem tells us that "in everything he did he served the Greater Community," but we’re not sure what this means. Who decides what the interests of the Greater Community are? Does this group exclude anyone? Is individual identity at odds with it? These are a few of the disturbing questions that the poem raises in relation to patriotism. And, of course, things are complicated by the fact that the poem seems to be set in America but was written by an Englishman.
The Unknown Citizen Theme of Passivity
The Unknown Citizen is called a modern-day "saint" by the State, but it isn’t clear just what he has done that is so worthy of praise. His most potentially heroic deed is serving in the army during a war, but does serving in a war automatically make you a hero, even if you were only doing what everyone else did? On the whole, the Unknown Citizen belonged to the faceless masses, from his consumer habits to his love of having "a drink" with his mates. Attacking the conformity of middle-class America has always been a favorite sport of intellectuals, and you can find tons of more contemporary examples, like the Oscar-winning movie American Beauty. You may choose to disagree with Auden’s perspective, or you could say, "Right on!" This is the kind of poem that battles conformity by provoking strong opinions from its readers
Summary
The Unknown Citizen Summary
We learn that the words we are about to read are written on a statue or monument dedicated to "The Unknown Citizen." The poem consists of several different kinds of people and organizations weighing in on the character of our dear "Citizen."
First, the not-so-friendly-sounding "Bureau of Statistics" says that "no official complaint" was ever made against him. More than that, the guy was a veritable saint, whose good deeds included serving in the army and not getting fired. He belonged to a union and paid his dues, and he liked to have a drink from time to time.
His list of stirring accomplishments goes on: he bought a newspaper and had normal reactions to advertisements. He went to the hospital once – we don’t know what for – and bought a few expensive appliances. He would go with the flow and held the same opinions as everyone else regarding peace and war. He had five kids, and we’re sure they were just lovely. In fact, the only thing the government doesn’t know about the guy is whether he was "free" and "happy," two utterly insignificant, trivial little details. He couldn’t have been unhappy, though, because otherwise the government would have heard.
Interpretation
The Unknown Citizen”
This poem which was written by W.H. Auden is about the sort of “new view” of your average Joe in the 20’th century and also in a sense the sort of monotony and drollness of that type of life style. It also ties in elements of an omnipotent government which was a popular belief at the time because throughout the poem a new branch that observes some part of the mans life is able to report on it. The poem is the unknown citizen because even though he was a “saint” who would not refuse to better the community in which he was living so does just about everyone who lives in the neighborhood, so in a sense the work he is doing is not really that important for if he didn’t do it another would. It says that he worked in a factory which I find ironic because his whole life seems to be like an assembly line with the same things occurring daily, go to work, read the paper, etc. Later on in the poem it is found out that he had a wife and five children which is awfully stereotyped to the “Brady Bunch” lifestyle of suburban living. The poem also indicates that he ad no real say in society and was very much a conformist to the popular opinion because the poem says “when there was peace he was for peace; when there was war, he went.” He also owned all the “necessities” that the “Modern Man” should own which is another indicator that he is a slave to popular consumer wants. The last to lines I find are ironic in asking if he was free or happy and that if he wasn’t the “omnipotent” government surely would have heard about it. The answer to the below question is no he was societies slave and being what he was I very much doubt he was happy
During the 1920s and 30s, many American writers left the states to become expatriates overseas, particularly in Europe. Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are three famous examples. W.H. Auden, however, did the opposite. He was an Englishman who moved back to "the colonies" (the U.S.) in 1939, at the height of his creative powers. Auden wrote "The Unknown Citizen" while living in New York, and the poem gives evidence of his culture shock when suddenly confronted with American-style chaos and consumerism.
As a poet, Auden is a chameleon capable of writing in many different forms and styles. He is considered a "modernist" writer, but his work is unlike that of any other poet of the past century. At a time when many poets were experimenting with obscure forms and new ways of using language, much of Auden’s poetry had more popular appeal. He was a master, for example, of the rhyming couplet (AA, BB, etc.), the simplest rhyme scheme in English. "The Unknown Citizen" is so accessible it almost sounds like an elaborate joke.
The poem is written in the voice of a fictional government bureaucrat – someone who sits at a desk and shuffles papers all day – whose decisions affect the lives of people he has never met. You could consider it a poetic version of George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in that it concerns a Big Brother-like state that knows everything about its citizens except the things that really matter. But the poem doesn’t sound as pessimistic or tortured as either of these novels It uses good old-fashioned humor to protest the numbing effects of modern life. It’s not the most "intellectual" of Auden’s works, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful to read. "The Unknown Citizen" is proof that great poetry doesn’t have to take itself seriously all the time.
Setting
The Unknown Citizen is a poem by W. H. Auden. Auden wrote it in 1939, shortly after moving from England to the United States. It was first published in 1939 in The New Yorker, and first appeared in book form in Auden's collection Another Time (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.[1] 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 arbary numbers and letters, not personal names.
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.
The epigraph to "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
It’s hard to know what kind of setting to imagine for this poem. You’ve got the setting of the monument on which the poem is inscribed, and then you’ve got the setting of The Big Man himself, our Unknown Citizen.
What kind of monument is it? We think a bronze statue of this famous Magritte painting would be a good fit. We don’t think the monument would let us know very much about the UC at all. Maybe it would just be a slab of clean white marble with no decoration, or a big marble replica of a dollar bill (because he was so good at buying things), or maybe it would be an obelisk like the Washington Monument. We’re sure you can come up with something interesting.
Anyway, we’re going to plop our monument down right in the middle of the Washington Mall, maybe next to the Lincoln Memorial. The Unknown Citizen deserves a central place in our nation’s capital, considering all his huge accomplishments like having five kids! It will be right down the street from the Bureau of Statistics, a huge, drab marble building. And, of course, it will have that strange dedication "To JS/07 M 378" on it.
As for the Unknown Citizen, he lives a very neat, organized society. It looks like a squeaky-clean 1950s TV show – except in the 1930s. The new Ford has just been waxed, the Jell-O is cooling in the frigidaire, and the kids are on the living room floor, listening to the latest episode of Little Orphan Annie on the radio:
"Who's that little chatter box?
The one with pretty auburn locks?
Whom do you see?
It's Little Orphan Annie."
If you’ve ever seen the Jim Carrey movie, The Truman Show, you know what we mean. But there’s a slightly seedy underside to this quaint little vision, and it’s that the government seems to know everything. There are tons of reports and paperwork to fill out, and researchers into Public Opinion are walking the streets, taking the mood of the public on every subject under the sun. If you say something odd or don’t pay your Union dues, people will look at you cock-eyed and maybe even stop talking to you. And, trust us, no one is ever going to ask if you’re happy
The Unknown Citizen Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay
There’s more to a poem than meets the eye.
Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our "How to Read a Poem" section for a glossary of terms.
The Unknown Citizen
This isn’t a poem that uses a lot of similes and metaphors. In fact, at times it seems deliberately un-poetic. The only metaphor we could find was the comparison between the Unknown Citizen and a saint. Then again, the entire poem is an elaborate comparison between the Unknown Citizen, whose accomplishments are ridiculously overstated, and the Unknown Soldier, which was created to honor heroic sacrifices that were never witnessed or confirmed.
Title: The title is the only place where the term "Unknown Citizen" is used, so it is a key to the entire poem. It lets us know that the poem is an allegory, or an extended comparison to figures outside the poem. "The Unknown Citizen" is meant to recall the idea of "The Unknown Soldier," or a soldier whose remains could not be identified after a battle.
Line 4: The word "saint" is a religious term, so the Unknown Citizen can’t actually be one, except in the modern sense, which means that we’re dealing with a metaphor. It’s also a drastic hyperbole – let’s face it, the guy wasn’t Gandhi.
Line 20: Everything necessary? Really? What about food, water, and shelter? This line is classic hyperbole, or exaggeration.
Bureaucracies and Investigation
The society depicted in the poem isn’t a real, historical place: it’s more like an ironic prophecy of the future using present-day parallels (or at least present-day from the perspective of 1939). The Unknown Citizen has been investigated to an absurd degree by all kinds of bureaucracies, from his employer, Fudge Motors, to Social Psychology workers, to Public Opinion researchers. There’s a paper trail a mile long on this guy, but none of it tells us anything useful about who he is.
Epigraph: The epigraph furthers the allegory set up by the title, comparing the non-existent Unknown Citizen to the idea of the Unknown Soldier. The "marble monument" to the Unknown Citizen makes us think of the various Tombs of the Unknown Soldier in places like Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
Line 1: The "Bureau of Statistics" is a symbol representing the way bureaucracies treat people as mere numbers and figures.
Line 5: The "Greater Community" is a vague cliché used by bureaucracies to foster a sense of teamwork. It’s not clear what the "community" refers to – his family, job, nation? Not all communities are compatible with one another, so it doesn’t make sense to speak of just one Greater Community.
Line 26: We think the "Eugenist" is a personification of the field of eugenics as a whole. No government would ever have a single person called a Eugenist in charge of population control.
Parodies and Irony
The whole idea of the Unknown Citizen is a parody of the serious military concept of the Unknown Soldier, which was created in order to recognize the sacrifice of soldiers who died anonymously. The poem is dripping with irony, as the speaker lists off accomplishments that aren’t accomplishments at all. At many points, the poem directly parodies existing American companies or organizations.
Line 2: It’s ironic that a poem of praise would begin on such a dull and tepid point as the lack of "official complaints."
Line 8: Fudge Motors, Inc. sounds to us like a parody of Ford Motors, Inc, the biggest auto company in the world at the time. But more delicious.
Line 18: "Producers Research and High-Grade Living" are parodies of real consumer organizations like Consumer Reports and Good Housekeeping.
Line 19: To say that he was "fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan" is a hilarious understatement. He must have been aware at a higher level than his "senses."
Line 20: The phrase "everything necessary to the Modern Man" is a cliché used by advertisers to sell stuff. Today it sounds so old-fashioned that we can easily recognize it as such
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