Listen to W.H. Auden read The Shield of Achilles: While working on “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides'” over the last weeks, I kept thinking back to these lines from Auden’s great poem. They seemed to describe ...

I n 1955, W. H. Auden published The Shield of Achilles. The poetry collection includes a lengthy sequence of poems that I would rate high among the spiritual and devotional classics of the 20th ...

The title poem is no less than an attempt to capture Western civilization in verse, masterfully exploring Christianity, empathy, and human connection by writing of Achilles’s brutal, martial ...

Published in 1955, the poem draws on a passage of Homer’s Iliad, where the lame blacksmith god Hephaestus, at the request of Thetis, Achilles’ mother, fashions a magnificent shield for the ...

I tried to guide my own path with a vision of the past as well: W.H. Auden writes of the glorification and disillusionment of war in his poem “The Shield of Achilles,” in which the goddess ...

Critic Ian Sansom's deeply informed and unapologetically digressive new book dives into Auden's life — as well as the life of his singular poem.

With war looming, W.H. Auden stood in a museum and was inspired to write. The resulting poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” is one of the most famous ever written about art.

This poem was published in The Atlantic ’s September 1939 issue, shortly after W. H. Auden immigrated to America, on the day that German troops marched into Poland and World War II began. First ...

Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles is getting a serious and heartening push from its publisher, Knopf, writes Roger Gathman. Does he seriously think there's an audience for a book that, among ...

The poem is about our inexorably divided self, an idea Auden was refining by reading (of course!) Montaigne and Lincoln.