The Peculiar Averageness of "The Unknown Citizen"
Every poem uses a literary device or style of writing to show its significance. Other than simple rhyme, this poem doesn't, and all but uses a centuries-old American stereotype and the irony within.
Auden was known for his flexibility in writing any form of poetry on any topic, using any literary devices, and masterfully engineered them to fit perfectly into the theme of his published piece. This poem, "The Unknown Citizen," lacks any complex literary devices, yet it is so striking when one reads it for the first time. Candidly, the simplicity woven into the verses had prepared me for the behemoth of a surprise when I realized the dominating stereotype (Which Barely Existed To Begin With) that Americans and immigrants wish for but can never reach, along with some open-ended verses that I will be exploring this post.
Long Story Short
W.H Auden was born in 1907. As a child, he went on the educational path that most other children went to and found his inspiration for poetry in 1922, at age 15, admiring the works of William Blake, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. Three years later, Auden went to Oxford University and worked with the soon-to-be-famous poet Stephen Spender. He displayed interest in the German language and later married Thomas Mann's daughter, Erika Mann. A few years before this, Auden used the help of T.S Eliot, one of the twentieth century's most revolutionary poets, to publish his first volume, Poems.
According to Britannica, W.H. Auden's writing career was divided into four phases. In his third phase, he changed his religious views from socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis to Christianity and published the volume Another Time, which contained the poem "The Unknown Citizen." In this volume, he expressed his devotion to Christianity, a daring feat in the middle of the war.
W.H. Auden wrote several poems and sequences of poems following this. One of his most significant feats was serving as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973. A few years before he died in 1973, Auden published two volumes: Collected Shorter Poems 1927–57 (1967) and Collected Longer Poems (1969).
W.H. Auden sadly died at age 66 from heart failure after reading his poems to the Austrian Society for Literature.
The Writing
This poem talks about what made the American in the story so perfectly normal and blended in with the others, making such a stereotypical world seem dystopian. The verses describe the things that make the person in the story so perfect, and soon, when I reached the middle of the poem, its true purpose struck me. When the poem pointed out the normality of the human, it set a basis for what could be considered an average. So, instead of praising the person in the poem, it points out the people's imperfections in our society.
There was also a sense of having to prove matter with empirical evidence concealed inside the poem. Within the poem, Auden talks about the Bureau of Statistics, The Union, Social Psychology workers, his Health Care card, Producers' Research and High-Grade Living, Public Opinion, and a Eugenist, who were all required to prove that the man in the story was fine and well. This evidence builds up to the late climax in the last two verses:
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
It sounded like freedom and happiness were absent in our everyday American world because of his desire to believe and do what the world does to stay regular. The urge to think otherwise would be impossible, thus shrouding any chance of 'imperfecting' our poem's 'perfect' world.
The Theme
As multiple other sources conclude, I agree that a possible theme could convey the state's outrageous control over the average citizen and mock the ubiquitous yearning to mimic this 'perfect' American lifestyle. To dig deeper into the latter, Auden is influencing the reader to perfect their way of life.
___________________
Disclaimer: Remember, this is just my honest opinion and what I think of a piece after gathering research and writing it down.
Thanks for reading The Literature Linguist!