W.H Auden's The Unknown Citizen

Phillip Schumacher

W.H Auden’s The Unknown Citizen is representative of what a country would deem to be the “ideal citizen”. In the whole of this poem, the citizen remains nameless and is described through government statistics rather than by any distinctive personality traits. The citizen is , thereby, divorced from any semblance of individuality and his subjectivity is reduced and diminished to that of the domineering power structure. It seems that the individual only exists insofar as his actions are reported and in strict agreement with that of the community; the community , in this case, is not a collection of individuals but a power structure that determines the lives of these individuals in conformity to their standard of what makes “the good life”. 

The citizen acts only as an instrument, an irreplaceable cog to a machine, that is not vital to the system, but allows it to maintain momentum to continue moving; the state apparatus gives the citizen the illusion that they, indeed, have the freedom to choose, but what freedom is that when the choices are not provided, but imposed upon the citizen. The question W.H Auden poses at the end of the poem, “Was he free? Was he happy?” is not as absurd as we may think; we can make the argument that happiness and freedom may be irreconcilable goals to have, that we can only have one and not the other. This citizen may have been “happy” because the standards by which “happiness” is constituted has been pre-imposed unto him; there were no other life styles that can potentially act as a comparison nor is there an objective referent in which his goals can be guided toward. He was happy because the state provided the definition of happiness and the means to which he was to achieve it. However, was this citizen free? The state provided all that is necessary for this citizen to be happy, but left him without an identity, without human dimensions, and therefore, without freedom. Happiness and Freedom are incommensurable goals; to have one, we must inevitably give of that of the other.

The citizen not being identified could mean a number of things. It demonstrates that the lives of the average individuals are interchangeable with one another and are constituted only by their social function and how well they best serve the larger interests of their society. The average citizen remains nameless because they are , in effect, unable to produce real change; this position is much desired by the dominant power structures because it is through these “unknown citizens” that their authority is unquestionably preserved. The sole obligation that is required of this citizen is for him to maintain his actions in alignment with that of his community, whether it be through his work or holding the “proper opinions for the time of year” (line 14) ; this line shows how these proclaimed “proper opinions” are not fixed in meaning, but is an arbitrary variable that changes upon the whim of the state. It then seems that throughout this poem, this individual is able to remain the “model citizen” among the contradictory fluctuations of this state; the values that are used to describe him are not at all “universal” values nor are the claims being made “normative” in nature. What this may denote is that the citizen remains “unknown” because this ideal citizen does not materially exist and is bolstered to be an imaginary ideal by which people can strive toward and project their own fitting fantasies upon. 

 This citizen is a concept constructed for the purpose of artificially uniting individuals to serve for an abstract common goal of “justice” which is by no means of their own resolutions, but is imposed upon them by the state apparatus.  The political system that is portrayed in this poem seems to reflect capitalistic elements; capitalism is an economic state which focuses solely on profits, perpetuating the myth of this grand free market, and atomizing individuals; people are only seen as individuals insofar as they are able to aid in sustaining the current system; those dissenting voices who unable to do this are disenfranchised, or marginalized and  isolated unto the outskirts of the society where they too, will, be left without a voice. Both of these cases, the citizen seems to be left without freedom, whether it be the dissident who fights against these injustices or the citizen in this poem, who remains passive, who lives according to the standards that have been predetermined for him, whose definitions and categories whom he lives by have already been provided upon his entrance into society.

Further Reading: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/unknown-citizen