The_Unknown_Citizen

The Unknown Citizen “The Unknown Citizen” W. H. Auden’s poem entitled “The Unknown Citizen” is a portrayal of a conflict between individualism and government control. “The Unknown Citizen” is a government’s view of the perfect modern man in an unrealistic society. In “The Unknown Citizen” the government has manipulated human intelligence to the point that they have control over everyone’s lives and minds. The motive behind the portrayal of an equal society is that it will eliminate hatred, envy and war. While this proves true, the numerous side effects such as loss of identity, lack of originality, and loss of personal feelings develop. The satiric society depicted in “The Unknown Citizen” is the authors attempt to ridicule a political system that tends to depersonalize its citizens and constantly strives to create equality. The attempt to create an equal society to the extreme makes many governments more like a dictatorship or communist system rather than a democracy. The society portrayed in the poem takes the notion of perfection and equality to the extreme. In the poem Auden uses sarcasm to express an obsessive and mindless state that only knows its citizens by numbers and letters, and evaluates their worth with statistics. The unknown, citizen, society, state, citizens, poem, government, auden, people, system, communist, rather, modern, man, individuality, equality, described, systems, statistics, social, should, political, personal, perfect, one, numbers, life, governments, everyone, equal, democracy, create, worth, ways, way