WH Auden

• Auden was an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War
• He was a British poet who became an American citizen in 1946
• He had an open and passionate approach to exploring his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was considered disgraceful and illegal in his native country (England)
• He wrote the Shield of Achilles in the early 1950s shortly after the atrocities of WW2
• Auden wrote the play 'The Ascent of F6' - Stop All the Clocks was a satirical poem of mourning for a fictional politician in Auden's play. The original version can be seen as a satirical warning about the dangers of excessive devotion to charismatic politicians such as Walter Mosley in England and Adolf Hitler in Germany
• Stop All the Clocks was written in 1936 as a satirical poem of mourning for a fictional politician in Auden's play 'The Ascent of F6'. The original version can be seen as a satirical warning about the dangers of excessive devotion to charismatic politicians such as Walter Mosley in England and Adolf Hitler. The final version was published in 1938 and is usually interpreted as an elegy for a dead lover
• Musee des Beaux Arts reflects the impact of suffering on mankind and humanity's indifference to the suffering occurring all around us . The Old Masters are able to depict suffering in a way that most people never see it - for example martyr's sacrifices are never properly appreciated and are overtaken by the mundane world
• Lullaby is an unconventional blue poem celebrating the impermanence and physicality of erotic love. Although the poem is not explicitly about homosexuality, it reflects Auden's open and passionate approach to his sexuality at a time where homosexuality was considered disgraceful and illegal in his native country (England)
• The Shield of Achilles is a reimagined version of the ekphrasis on the Shield which was made for the ancient war hero Achilles in Homer's epic poetry the Iliad. The poem juxtaposes the traditional, classifcal ideas of heroism (as embodied by Achilles) with the harsh, brutal and impersonal reality of modern warfare
• The Shield of Achilles was written in the early 1950s shortly after the atrocities of WW2. The poem could be seen as a warning about the increasing domination of oppressive totalitarian societies and the loss of individual human dignity which continued into the Cold War period