Talk:The Shield of Achilles

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this article needs drastic work done to it.

Amen. Not least because at least one of the quotes from the poem is wrong - it should be "marble, well-governed cities," not "ungoverned cities"!!

Do-oh. Fixed that problem; many remain. I've left a message at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Poetry requesting help from an expert. Cheers, CWC(talk) 02:10, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Does this poem really need its own article? I believe the poem is notable, but I'm not sure that the article can do much more than acknowledge the poem's existence--as far as I know, there's not much secondary literature on "the Shield of Achilles." --Akhilleus (talk) 14:14, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Okay. I've made some rather drastic adaptions to this page - cut it down and made it more factual rather than critical (though it still contains a number of my value judgments - please do change them). I agree that this poem may not need a page to itself, although it is arguably Auden's best-known and most celebrated work. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 131.111.8.104 (talk • contribs) from the University of Cambridge.

Thank you, "131.111.8.104", for that edit. The article is now much more informative. (BTW, I came to this article by mistake, looking for information about Philip Bobbitt's book, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History.) Your explanation above is very helpful, too. Have you considered creating an account here? You would be an asset to Wikipedia. Again, thanks for improving this article. CWC(talk) 04:15, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

The page is now completely rewritten in the hope of bringing up to reasonable standards of accuracy and usefulness. Two printed references are added; copyvio completely removed, and link to copyvio replaced with link to authorized text of the poem. At least this is a start. Macspaunday 23:34, 26 December 2006 (UTC)