The Unknown Citizen
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The Unknown Citizen is a poem by W. H. Auden. It was published in 1939 in the New Yorker, shortly after Auden became an American citizen, and was first published in book form in 1940, in Auden's collection Another Time. It is the epitaph of a man, identified only by a combination of letters and numbers ("JS/07/M/378"), and 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]
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[edit] Interpretation
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.
In addition, an epitaph to the Unknown Citizen is a parody of the symbolic Tomb of the Unknown Soldier commemorating unidentified soldiers that died in wars, in particular the First World War referenced in the poem.[2]
[edit] Facts about the "Unknown Citizen" himself
The citizen described in the poem was a retired factory worker for the fictional automotive corporation Fudge Motors, Inc. Apart from serving in the First World War, he worked in this factory his entire life. He was married, with five children, and was well-liked by his friends. He held no radical views politically or economically, and was the ultimate average citizen.
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