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

To what extent do you regard The sort Of Achilles as attribute of Audens work as whole?At first of all glance Audens verse the Shield of Achilles appears to be focused on the classical world. The rimes classical nature is firstindicated by the title- Achilles was of course a famous Greek hero,and throughout the meter there be further classical references, manyof which Auden has taken from daybook XVIII of Homers Iliad- Marblewell-governed cities (l.3), athletes at their games (l.46),Hephaestos, hobbled outside(a) (l.61). However, the meter also combinesthese classical details with the modern world- Proved by statistics(l.17), prickly wire enclosed an arbitrary spot (l.31). Althoughthere is this unusual confederacy of classical and modern, the poemcan be seen as timeless tug 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)hither the army who are enduring a belief (l.21) that they are doing advanced 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 film as it appears in other poems suchas Gare du musical instrument digital interface======================================================================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 closely 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 to synopsis a characteristic Auden poem. The Shield of Achilles lacksmany features that would make it characteristic. For example, poemssuch as Moon Landing and a Walk subsequently 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 areentire poems which are characteristic.---------------------------------------------------------------------1 It is notable that Ist September 1939 appeared on many websites after the September eleventh attacks in 2001.