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Today, on September 8th, 2008, the site contains 193 poets, 8,680 poems and 4,529 comments.
Analysis and comments on The Unknown Citizen by W. H. Auden

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Comment 3 of 23, added on November 28th, 2004 at 5:51 PM.

you aren't supposed to take this poem literally. the "unknown citizen" refers to the average man back in the time when the poem was written. I believe that this poem has a great message about how things were around that time, people were just a number or a statistic.

ben from Canada
Comment 2 of 23, added on November 20th, 2004 at 8:00 AM.

If you can sent me the selected poems of W.H.Auden,
for I am very interesting in his poems.

Deibormi Toi from India
Comment 1 of 23, added on November 17th, 2004 at 12:21 AM.

Isn't it interesting that the poem list all the facts about this everyday average blue collar worker but he's still "unknown"? He's unknown b.c we don't know him as a human being. Here's an example...Think of your grandmother or grandfather. Just another life on this planet. If you don't know that much about them, pick somebody else. I'll choose my grandmother. She was a wonderful human being. Very loving, funny, and lived her life with a positive attitude. My children however, will not know her. Sure, they'll know when she lived, what she did, how many kids she had, etc. But they won't know what you could do to make her mad and then how to make her happy again to make up for it. I knew how to do that. She was a big part of my life, but my children won't experience that. Just like this unknown citizen. It's like that old saying " To the world you may be one person, but to one person you're the world" This man meant something to some people. But what does he mean to us?

Adrienne from United States

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Information about The Unknown Citizen

Poet: W. H. Auden
Poem: The Unknown Citizen
Added: Feb 20 2003
Viewed: 20067 times


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The Unknown Citizen

Last read:
Sep 5 2008, 7:21PM
Viewed 20067 times.

Added: Feb 20 2003


Auden Info

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(75 poems)
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