Analyzing the Poem “The Unknown Citizen”

W. H. Auden, in his poem ‘The Unknown Citizen’, exposes the modern situation where a person loses his/her individual identity and is rendered a mere cog in the state-machine. This obituary of an unknown state “hero” is apparently prepared by a state official but what the poet suggests and what the reader reads between the lines attribute to the irony in the poem.

The poem starts by identifying the person in question as someone against whom there is no official complaint, as vouched by the Bureau of Statistics. He is called a ‘saint’ in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, given how he served the community in everything he did. The man worked in a factory and is said to have made his employers content with his service, while at the same time being popular with his colleagues and in workers’ union. Similarly, he is reported to be a nice consumer, who would buy everything from radio, car to insurance policy and papers and contribute to the economy, with no complaint whatsoever against anything. The man is also praised as a gentle citizen, whose views always fell in line with the government. As expected, he entered into matrimony and is assessed to have added the right number of children to the national population. And, as reported, he never interfered with his children’s education. So, given the perfect record of the man, it is inferred that the man must have been happy.

But, as we read through the poem, soaking up the so-called saintly image of this citizen concocted by the state, it raises a number of questions. One of the major questions is, is the man as happy as the state declares him to be? The objection isn’t so much with him being given the epithet of ‘happy’ as the state declaring him so, which reeks of state’s general assumption about the citizenry and even its attempt to paint an all-good picture for public consumption. Besides, the treatment of this ‘unknown citizen’ by the state is abysmal. While the state doesn’t bother to identify this eponymous person by his name despite the fact that the Bureau of Statistics has every record related to him at its disposal, how it has collected every bit of information clearly bespeaks the character of an overly surveillance state, which is indeed an anathema to a modern democratic society. So overall, the poem can be seen as a satire against modern capitalist states that treat their citizens as mere nonentities and have turned into surveillance states that unnecessarily spy on its citizenry. The poem’s title ‘The Unknown Citizen’ also rings ironical because the extent of details we are offered in the poem speak otherwise. So, we could get an impression that the state is deliberately withholding the identity of the so-called unknown citizen about whom it knows so much.