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 the facts and problems I was pondering. The three ...

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 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 Shield of Achilles W.H. Auden, edited by Alan Jacobs. Princeton Univ, $22.95 (128p) ISBN 978-0-691-21865-6 ...

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 ...

It's hard not to think of W.H. Auden's poem "The Shield of Achilles," where the warrior's mother Thetis looks, aghast, at the scene Hephaestus has wrought on the shield to please her son.

Enough reputation; the poems! My favorite Auden is the American Auden, the middle-ish Auden, the Auden that started to emerge in the ‘40s, with New Year Letter, and came out more fully in the ...

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 ...

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.