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The Unknown Citizen
by
W. H. Auden
Home
Poetry
The Unknown Citizen
Literary Devices
Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
Intro
The Poem
Summary
Analysis
Themes
Quotes
Study Questions
Best of the Web
How to Read a Poem
Symbolism, Imagery, Wordplay
The Unknown Citizen
Bureaucracies and Investigation
Parodies and Irony
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Table of Contents
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The Unknown Citizen Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay
There’s more to a poem than meets the eye.
The Unknown Citizen
This isn’t a poem that uses a lot of similes and metaphors. In fact, at times it seems deliberately un-poetic. The only metaphor we could find was the comparison between the Unknown Citizen a...
Bureaucracies and Investigation
The society depicted in the poem isn’t a real, historical place: it’s more like an ironic prophecy of the future using present-day parallels (or at least present-day from the perspectiv...
Parodies and Irony
The whole idea of the Unknown Citizen is a parody of the serious military concept of the Unknown Soldier, which was created in order to recognize the sacrifice of soldiers who died anonymously. The...
