To what extent do you regard The Shield Of Achilles as characteristic E

To what extent do you regard The Shield Of Achilles as peculiarity of Audens work as unscathed?At primary glance Audens verse form the Shield of Achilles appears to befocused on the unstained world. The poems classical nature is firstindicated by the title- Achilles was of course a famous Greek hero,and throughout the poem there are further classical references, manyof which Auden has taken from Book xviii of Homers Iliad- Marblewell-governed cities (l.3), athletes at their games (l.46),Hephaestos, hobbled away (l.61). However, the poem also combinesthese classical details with the modern world- Proved by statistics(l.17), Barbed wire enfold an arbitrary spot (l.31). Althoughthere is this unusual combination of classical and modern, the poemcan be seen as unchangedColumn by column in a cloud of dust===================================They marched away enduring a beliefWhose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.(The Shield of Achilles ll.21-23)Here the army who are endu ring a belief (l.21) that they are doinggood can be as easily applicable to the modern day (i.e. the situationin Iraq) as to classical times. The timeless nature of the poem can besaid to be a characteristic feature as it appears in other poems suchas Gare du midi======================================================================clutching a little caseHe walks out briskly to infect a cityWhose terrible future may have just arrived.(Gare Du midi, ll.6-8)Here we are led to believe that a man is about to unleash a terribleweapon on a city and although the poem was written in December 1938,its proleptic nature allows the poem to be much more in tune with thew... ...atures, it is perhaps impossible tooutline a characteristic Auden poem. The Shield of Achilles lacksmany features that would make it characteristic. For example, poemssuch as moonlight Landing and a Walk After Dark are rife withcolloquial (Mneh- Moon Landing, ll.22) and recherch (Lacrimaererum- A Walk After Dark, l.30) language, whereas The Shield ofAchilles has none, instead the language in the poem obeys the poemsprinciple of contrast- it alternates between classical and modernlanguage. Therefore its reasonable to say that there are manyre-occurring themes throughout Audens poems, but not that there are whole poems which are characteristic.---------------------------------------------------------------------1 It is notable that Ist September 1939 appeared on many websites after the September 11th attacks in 2001.