In The Museum Of Beautiful Art Essay

W. H. Auden is a very well respected author in both American literature and also British Literature. One of his very famous pieces of writing is the poem In the Museum of Beautiful Art, as it is translated in English, is a very famous poem that is written about a painting. The painting might have been even more famous than the poem, it was a painting called The Fall of Icarus. Icarus is a Greek character that had a father as an inventor, unfortunately Icarus got in some trouble and ended up being sent to prison. His father decided to invent a pair of wings that were made out of wax that his son could use to escape from prison once he was sentenced. His father told him that the only thing he had to be careful of while flying was getting too close to the sun, because the wings were made out of wax and would melt …show more content…
Auden was a well-known and well-respected author because of how much influence his writing had. In this specific poem, In the Museum of Beautiful Art, he is talking about the problem with how people in our modern culture only care about their own suffering. He isn’t necessarily saying that people only are concerned about themselves, but that we are only concerned with our own suffering. We don’t truly care about someone else pain and he says that is the problem with our culture. One reason why he thought it was such a predominant problem was because is had been a problem for a very long time and nothing had changed. And one thing that is kind of scary to think about is the fact that nothing has changed since he wrote this poem. People are still only concerned about their own suffering, except it can be shown on a much more severe level today. When people are being beaten, raped, and murdered right in front of other people and no one is doing an absolute thing about it. I strongly believe that W. H. Auden was referring to the fact or idea that people truly don’t care about other peoples suffering when he wrote the poem In the Museum of Beautiful