The Library of Congress Variant of “The Shield of Achilles”

Extract

As part of poetry magazine's annual poetry day, wealthy patrons of the arts gathered in chicago on 19 november 1960 for a private auction of books and manuscripts that benefited the Modern Poetry Association. Among the items available for bidding were handwritten fair copies of W. H. Auden's “The Shield of Achilles,” “Musée des Beaux Arts,” and “The Unknown Citizen,” all on 8½-by-11-inch sheets of unlined white typing paper, the poet's signature conspicuously appended to the bottom right corner of each page. Having been recognized earlier in the day as Poetry's “Poet of Honor,” Auden had written the copies for the charity event. Hyman J. Sobiloff, a successful industrialist and published poet, purchased the collection for one thousand dollars. In January 1961, he donated the pieces to the Library of Congress, where they remain to this day. At the time, the collection proved somewhat newsworthy: Poetry, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post and Times-Herald, and the Library of Congress Information Bulletin all ran brief articles on the auction and donation. Since then, however, the documents have been essentially lost to history. Few, if any, other written records of them remain, Auden's biographers have ignored the manuscripts, and no critical analysis of their content has yet been published.