In the Iliad, Achilles’s goddess-mother Thetis asks the iron-forging god Hephaestos to make new armor for Achilles. Achilles needed new armor to rejoin the horrific violence against men of the Trojan War. About seven years after the end of World War II, W. H. Auden in his poem “The Shield of Achilles” recast Hephaestos making Achilles’s armor. Auden represented gender horror in a more subtle way than did the Iliad.
Auden’s poem begins with “she.” That “she” is Achilles’s goddess-mother Thetis:
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign. [1]
Men have long revered a great mother goddess. Like a young child, Achilles revered his mother Thetis. He prayed to her for help. Hephaestos, who regarded himself as deeply indebted to Thetis, would do anything for her. He credited Thetis with acting courageously to save his life after his mother, the hateful head-goddess Hera, threw him off Mount Olympus because of his physical disability. In the Iliad, Thetis isn’t a demure, passive goddess who merely looks over men’s shoulders.[2]
Auden represented Thetis according to the gender pieties of post-World War II men. Auden’s Thetis is pure, innocent, and moral:
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The woman Thetis wants to see fruitful nature, well-governed, peacefully trading cities, and traditional religious beliefs and practices. The man Hephaestos represents the artificial, inorganic, cruelty of modern, bureaucratic society. The officials and sentries are men. The ordinary decent folk are women. The abstract, scarcely colored figures are men suffering penal punishment. One of those men would come to be in modern medieval scholarship the model for “WomanChrist.”[3] No one laughs.
Achilles with his pride died seeking glory in violence against men. In the honor culture of archaic Greece, pride and shame were the measure of men. That measure separates men from the ordinary joys of life. After World War II, ordinary men, like the three pale figures in Auden’s poem, faced the honor-culture measure of men:
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
The three pale figures bound to three posts died as men because they lost their pride. That isn’t like Jesus and one of the two thieves crucified with him.[4]
Gender stereotypes deny men’s feelings and obscure the emotional horror of violence against men. So it is in Auden’s poem:
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept. [5]
Why did Auden write, “That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third”? The prevalence of boys being raped is about equal to the prevalence of girls being raped. Violence against males typically isn’t explicitly specified. The victim is merely “a third.” The mediated masses don’t weep because men are raped or men are killed. Famous poets, economists, and bureaucrats succeed with the same art. Their sense of social justice follows the logic and statistics of profit in competition for attention.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief. [6]
The Every Woman has never walked a mile in his shoes. She doesn’t know what it would mean to be for him.
The grim-lipped armorer
Thetis of the shining breasts
Rushed away to Achilles.
None cried out in dismay
At what the goddess had brought
To equip her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long. [7]
W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” depicts modern gender horror. That seems quite different from the massive slaughter of men in the Iliad. The Iliad and Auden’s poem, however, are part of the same old song.[8] Sing a new song of justice for men!
* * * * *
Read more:
- Zeus should have rejected Thetis’s plea for her son Achilles
- Greek women warriors danced Pyrrhic victory for gender equality
- sexist Selective Service overturned; gender equality progress at last
Notes:
[1] W. H. Auden, “The Shield of Achilles,” stanzas 1-2, quoted from Mendelson (2022) vol. 2. This poem was originally published in “Poetry, October 1952.” Fuller (1998) p. 449. Based on that citation, Poetry apparently is a periodical, probably published in Britain or the U.S. Alan Jacobs didn’t provide a better citation. Auden (2024) p. 79. Further research indicates that Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” was first published in Poetry, a magazine founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe in Chicago and published by the Modern Poetry Association (USA), which in 2003 became the Poetry Foundation. In 1952, Karl Shapiro was the editor of Poetry. For additional citation details, Auden (1952).
Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” was reprinted as the title poem and the first poem of the center section of Auden (1955). That book, The Shield of Achilles, won a National Book Award in the U.S. in 1956 and was reprinted in that year. Auden (1956). For a critical edition of the poem, Mendelson (2022) vol. 2, pp. 417-8; textual notes, id. pp. 956-7.
Hephaestos making a shield and other armor for Achilles at the request of the goddess Thetis is narrated in Iliad, Book 18. The description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad is an early and influential example of ekphrasis — a detailed verbal description of a work of visual art. Hephaestos is more commonly named with the Latinate form, Hephaestus.
W. H. Auden is a very eminent poet. He was Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1954 until his death in 1973. For additional scholarly resources on Auden, the Auden Society. Auden is “generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century.” Auden is at least comparable in status to T. S. Eliot. See, e.g. St. Amant (2018).
The Shield of Achilles is a major work of Auden:
It is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged, in large part because its poetic techniques are not easily perceived or assessed. It is the most unified of all Auden’s collections, and indeed — once its intricate principles of organization are grasped — may be seen as the true successor of those long poems of the 1940s.
Auden (2024), Jacobs introduction, p. x. Its central, title poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” is according to Jacobs, “Auden’s staggeringly ambitious revision” of the ekphrasis of the shield of Achilles that Hephaestos makes in the Iliad, Book 18. Id. p. xxi.
Auden valued “The Shield of Achilles” highly enough to have made two recordings of him speaking it. He recorded the poem in 1968 for the Spoken Arts label in New Rochelle, New York. Here’s a edited version and a fuller version. He also recorded “The Shield of Achilles” in 1971 for Yale Series of Recorded Poets, issued by Westinghouse Learning Press, New York. Mendelson (2022) vol. 2, pp. 758-9. Others have also recorded the poem, e.g. Joshua Gibbs (2014) and Henry Blaine Silver (2022).
Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” has been widely discussed through to the present day. This poem “puts the post-war scene into just the kind of oblique and dramatically archetypal context that brings out both its full horror and its religious meaning.” Fuller (1998) p. 451. For a scholastic analysis of the poem, Reed (2021). Some have understood it to contrast implicitly the beauty, lyricism, and personal heroism of archaic Greece with the “martial horror” of modernity, “the anxious meaninglessness of modern life, the warfare engendered by it, and the cruel social realities that lie behind both.” Brown (nd). Without explicitly considering war gender-structured as violence against men, Belloncle read “The Shield of Achilles” as illuminating “the constancy of war throughout the ages.” Summers similarly perceived:
Auden’s point, then, is not that the Homeric idealization of war contrasts with contemporary militarism, but that the heroic age contained within it the seeds of modern dehumanization. … The poem thus exposes the disparity between the idyllic appearance of the Homeric world and the ugly realities that the appearance conceals, and it suggests a continuity of those realities into the contemporary world.
Summers (1984) p. 220. A central continuity is the gender position of men in relation to war.
Subsequent quotes above, except the final one, are similarly from Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.” Those quotes are stanzas 4-5 (She looked over his shoulder…), stanza 6 (The mass and majesty of this world, all…), stanzas 7-8 (She looked over his shoulder…), and stanza 3 (Out of the air a voice without a face…).
[2] Discussions of Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” have considered gender only superficially when they recognize that Auden changed Thetis’s position. For example, a Homeric scholar declared:
One of the most significant changes that Auden has made to the original tale of the making of the shield is the role of Thetis in the scene. In Iliad 18 Thetis does not follow Hephaestus into his workshop (468 τὴν μὲν λίπεν αὐτοῦ ‘he left her there’). By introducing Thetis as an anxious viewer of Hephaestus’ making of the shield, Auden reminds us that the shield reflects not only the story of Achilles but also that of Thetis.
Yamagata (2023) p. 3. The shield also implicitly represents the story of the mass slaughter of men. Why don’t Auden and other elite authors remind readers about the horrific history of violence against men within structures of gender injustice that men have long endured?
[3] Newman (1995). See also Georges Duby’s study of medieval women. Cf. medieval ostentatio genitalium.
The central section of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles begins with “The Shield of Achilles” and ends with “Ode to Gaea.” In ancient Greek myth, Gaea / Gaia is a mother goddess who represents the earth and the origin of all life. She urged her son Cronos to castrate her husband / his father Uranus. “Ode to Gaea” ends with praise for Gaea as pure, unchanging truth:
And Earth, till the end, will be herself; she has never been moved
Except by Amphion, and orators have not improved
Since misled Athens perished
Upon Sicilian marble: what,
To her, the real one, can our good landscapes be but lies,
Those woods where tigers chum with deer and no root dies,
That tideless bay where children
Play bishop on a golden shore.
Auden (1955) pp. 58-9, “Ode to Gaea,” final stanza.
[4] Humility, not pride, characterized Jesus, e.g. Matthew 11:29 (Jesus calls himself gentle and lowly in heart), John 13:1-16 (Jesus washing his disciples’ feet), Luke 22:24-27 (Jesus teaches that leaders should be humble and serve others), Luke 14:7-11 (Jesus teaches that he who humbles himself will be exalted), Philippians 2:5-8 (Jesus obediently humbled himself on the cross). One of the thieves crucified with Jesus humbly asked for forgiveness. The other thief arrogantly demanded that Jesus save himself and them. Luke 23:39-42.
[5] Salter, who described “The Shield of Achilles” as “my own favorite among his midsized poems,” reads the ragged urchin as having never heard that “one could weep because another wept” as representing the “tragedy” of the poem. Salter (2023). Summers (1984) similarly interprets this verse as central and profound. Id. p. 232. The verse seems to me better interpreted as bathetic. Similar words of Paul to the Christian community at Rome are less cloyingly sentimental and more shocking:
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.
{ εὐλογεῖτε τοὺς διώκοντας ὑμᾶς εὐλογεῖτε καὶ μὴ καταρᾶσθε χαίρειν μετὰ χαιρόντων κλαίειν μετὰ κλαιόντων }
Romans 12:14-15 via Blue Letter Bible.
[6] Poets disparaging statistics now seems banal. Perhaps in 1952 contempt for statistics was a more interesting position:
Among the writers who most influence Auden in this period was the Austrian thinker Rudolf Kassner (1873–1959), especially in his 1919 book Zahl und Gesicht. The German phrase of his title generally means “quantity and quality,” but literally means “Number and Face,” and in 1950 Auden wrote a poem, “Numbers and Faces,” that resonated with Kassner’s ideas. Kassner’s distinction becomes a way for Auden to rearticulate the distinction he made in his 1946 poem “Under Which Lyre” between the followers of Apollo and the followers of Hermes: the Apollonians of the earlier poem live in the later poem’s “Kingdom of Number,” while Hermetics are drawn to particular human faces.
Auden (2024), Jacob’s introduction, pp. xxii-iii. In newspapers and popular journals, use of statistics is highly rhetorical. Like words, statistics can describe truth, but don’t necessarily do so. Apart from the logic of a particular moral framework such as utilitarianism, neither words nor statistics can prove a cause morally just.
[7] This stanza is a modified version of Auden’s final stanza in “The Shield of Achillles.” Auden’s original has the poor dear goddess Thetis crying in dismay and blaming the disabled man Hephaestos:
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
Auden thus significantly changed the song of the Iliad concerning Thetis and Hephaestos. Auden’s recasting of the Iliad perhaps served the emotional needs of men returning home after participating in the horrific violence against men of World War II.
Auden’s concern for time patterns is signaled in the The Shield of Achilles’s third section, entitled “Horae Canonicae {Canonical Hours}.” That’s a time pattern associated with early Christian communities. One specification of these hours occurs in the Rule of Saint Benedict, composed about 530 GC. Auden’s section “Horae Canonicae” has the epitaph, “Immolatus vicerit {Having been sacrificed, he conquered}.” That’s a reference to Christ. It’s perhaps taken from Venantius Fortunatus’s hymn, “Sing, my tongue, the strife of glorious combat {Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis}.” Medieval Latin poets adapted “Pange, lingua” it to mock courtly love. It also provided the meter for Angelbert’s poem lamenting the horrific violence against men at the battle of Fontenoy in 841. Jacobs sees “The Shield of Achilles” as fulfilling “Immolatus vicerit.” Auden (2024), Jacob’s introduction, pp. xxiv-xxxiv. Auden, however, provides no critical perspective on men’s sacrificial gender position. It wasn’t the time for Auden to fill that negative space.
Auden included in The Shield of Achilles an obscure prefatory epigraph lamenting bad conditions and temporal disjointedness:
From bad lands where eggs are small and dear
Climbing to worse by a stonier
Track, when all are spent we hear it — the right song
For the wrong time of year.
Auden (1955), epigraph printed just below the dedication “For Lincoln and Fidelma Kirstein.” Cf. Ecclesiastes 3:1-11. The time of year, like the time of day, is a continually recurring event. If the right time of year exists, it will come. The right song for the right time of year will come.
[8] Within the same section of The Shield of Achilles in which “The Shield of Achilles” comes, Auden placed another poem, entitled “The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning.” Concerning the poet in relation to the generic human, gendered as male (“Man”), this poem concludes:
For given Man, by birth, by education,
Imago Dei, who forgot his station,
The self-made creature who himself unmakes,
The only creature ever made who fakes
With no more nature in his loving smile
Than in his theories of a natural style,
What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing,
Can trick his lying nature into saying
That love, or truth in any serious sense,
Like orthodoxy, is a reticence.
Quoted from Mendelson (2022) vol. 2, p. 424. Randall Jarrell, an eminent poet, aptly commented:
I know that I ought to respond, “True, true! I’ll never tell the truth again. Anybody like to join me in some tall tales and verbal playing?” But what I really say is — but I’ll be reticent.
Jarrell (1955) p. 604. Jarrell wasn’t generally contemptuous of Auden’s poetry. Jarrell in various ways greatly admired Auden poetry, which had a large influence on him. On Jarrell’s relationship with Auden, Jarrell (1952 / 2005) and Monroe (1979), Chapter 5.
Auden was an acute and severe self-critic. He rejected some of his published poems as “dishonest.” In his preface to his Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957, Auden wrote:
A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained. For example, I once expressed a desire for ‘New styles of architecture’; but I have never liked modern architecture. I prefer old styles, and one must be honest even about one’s prejudices. Again, and much more shamefully, I once wrote:
History to the defeated
may say alas but cannot help nor pardon.To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable.
Auden (1957) p. 15.
Auden eventually described his poem “September 1, 1939” as “the most dishonest poem I have ever written.” Just as for “The Shield of Achilles,” war is a central concern of “September 1, 1939.” Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” was first published in the U.S. public affairs journal The New Republic on October 18, 1939 under the editorship of Bruce Bliven. By the mid-1950s, Auden rejected this poem and refused to have it included in any of his poetry collections. On “September 1, 1939,” Mendelson (1999) pp, 477-8, Lenfield (2015), and Woo (2023).
Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” seems to me to be more dishonest than his “September 1, 1939.” Having interpreted “The Shield of Achilles” without regard for gender, Jarrell described it as an “impressive, carefully planned, entirely comfortless poem.” Jarrell (1955) p. 604. But Jarrell also observed, “a comfortable frivolity about much of ‘The Shield of Achilles.’” Id. p. 607. Was Auden comforting himself at the reader’s expense? Mendelson observed:
From the moment it appeared in print in 1952 “The Shield of Achilles” was welcome in anthologies for its sturdy unobjectionable sentiments against violence and war. Yet the moral and technical intelligence of Auden’s poem rests in its deeper inexplicit argument about the relation of language and act, and it is a greater and more disturbing work than even its admirers suggest.
Mendelson (1999) p. 375. Mendelson, who interpreted the poem without regard for gender, seems to me to have characterized it well in a way that he himself didn’t understand.
[images]
(1) Hephaestus polishing Achilles’s shield for Thetis. Painting by the Dutuit Painter on a two-handled amphora (wine/oil jar). Made in Athens about 470 BGC. Preserved as accession # 13.188 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Credit: Bartlett Collection — Museum purchase with funds from the Francis Bartlett Donation of 1912. Source image via MFABoston under non-commercial Terms of Use. A Gorgon-head image (Gorgoneion) is a common shield device and appears on the shield of Achilles in the Sarti fragment of the Tabulae Iliaca. Hardi (1985) p. 22. Hephaestus forging armor for Achilles at Thetis’s request is a well-established theme in images crafted throughout history. Here’s an image collection for that theme.
(2) Thetis, inspecting the shield that Hephaestus made for Achilles, sees herself reflected in it. Hephaestus polishes the other side. A craftsman works on the helmet for Achilles. Fresco made 48-75 GC in the House of Paccius Alexander (IX 1, 7, triclinium e), Pompeii. Preserved in Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (MANN inv. 9529). Source image thanks to Marie-Lan Nguyen and Wikimedia Commons. Here’s another photo. This composition might have adapted a representation of Aphrodite seeing herself in the Shield of Ares. Hardie (1985) p. 19. Eight paintings of Thetis in the forge of Hephaestus have survived in Pompeiian wall frescos from before 79 GC. Id. Here are Thetis in the forge of Hephaestus in the House of Siricus {Domus Vedi Sirici} (VII.1.47) and in the House of Ubonus {Domus Uboni} (IX.5.2).
(3) Hephaestus giving to Thetis the armor he made for Achilles at her request. Painting by the Foundry Painter on an Attic red-figure caylix krater (wide-mouth jar used for mixing water and wine), made 490-480 BGC. Preserved as accession # F 2294 in the Altes Museum, Antiquities Collection {Antikensammlung}, Berlin, Germany. Credit: Formerly in the Schloss Charlottenburg. Source image thanks to Bibi Saint-Pol and to Wikimedia Commons. Hephaestus presenting Thetis the armor he made for Achilles at her request is a well-established theme in images crafted throughout history. Here’s an image collection for that theme.
(4) Thetis presents Achilles with the new armor that she had Hephaestus make for him. Painting by the Alamura Painter on an Attic red-figure calyx krater, made 470-460 BGC. Preserved as accession # 48.262 in the Walters Art Museum. Credit: Acquired by Henry Walters, 1925. Enhanced source image via Wikimedia Commons. The Walters describes this image as a generic departure scene in which a young man heading off to war stands by his family’s altar and receives armor from a woman. The shield here contains an image of a long, sinuous snake. That’s a common feature on representations of the shield of Achilles in Pompeiian frescoes. Hardie (1985) p. 28, n. 119. The snake on the shield of Achilles probably represents “the constellation of the serpent, Draco, which separates the two Bears of the poles.” Id. p. 19. Thetis presenting armor to Achilles might well have become a generic image of a man departing for war.
(5) Shield of Achilles as imagined by John Flaxman, c. 1810-1817, and crafted in silver gilt by Philip Rundell for Rundell Bridge & Rundell. Completed in 1821 for George IV’s British coronation banquet. At the center is the god Apollo riding a quadriga. Preserved as RCIN 51255 in the Royal Collection Trust, Britain.
References:
Auden, W. H. 1952. “The Shield of Achilles.” Poetry (Chicago, IL, by the Poetry Foundation). 81 (1): 3-5.
Auden, W. H. 1955. The Shield of Achilles. New York, NY: Random House.
Auden, W. H. 1956. The Shield of Achilles. New York, NY: Random House.
Auden, W. H. 1966. Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957. London: Faber and Faber.
Auden, W. H. 2024. The Shield of Achilles. With preface, introduction, and notes by Alan Jacobs. W.H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Introduction (alternate web presentation). Review by Steve Donoghue.
Belloncle, Sophia. 2024. ‘He Would Not Live Long: The Postwar World in W.H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.”’Voegelin View. Essays. Online.
Brown, Rick. nd. ‘A Bloody Torpor: The Banality of Violence in Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.”’ Modern American Poetry Site. Online.
Fuller, John. 1998. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hardie, P. R. 1985. “Imago Mundi: Cosmological and Ideological Aspects of the Shield of Achilles.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies. 105: 11–31.
Jarrell, Randall. 1952 / 2005. Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden. Edited by Stephanie Burt and Hannah Brooks-Motl. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Jarrell, Randall. 1955. “Review: Recent Poetry.” The Yale Review: A National Quarterly. Summer, 1955, pp. 598-608. Includes Jarrell’s review of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles.
Lenfield, Spencer. 2015. ‘Why Auden Left: “September 1, 1939” and British Cultural Life.’ Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. Posted online Dec. 9, 2015.
Mendelson, Edward. 1999. Later Auden. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Mendelson, Edward, ed. 2022. Poems. Vol. 1: 1927-1939. Vol. 2: 1940-1973. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Review by Steve Donoghue and Salter (2023).
Monroe, Hayden Keith. 1979. An Ornament of Civilization: The Literary Criticism of Randall Jarrell. Ph.D. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Newman, Barbara. 1995. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Reed, Monique. 2021. “The Shield of Achilles by W.H Auden – Teaching Presentation – Analysis of context, poem and language.” YouTube video.
Salter, Mary Jo. 2023. “Our Auden.” Literary Matters. 15.2. Online.
St. Amant, E. A. 2018. “W H Auden versus T S Eliot.” Online post at eastamant.com.
Summers, Claude J. 1984. ‘“Or One Could Weep Because Another Wept”: The Counterplot of Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.”’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 83 (2): 214–32.
Woo, David. 2023. “Review: Auden in the 21st Century (on The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I: 1927–1939 and Volume II: 1940–1973, edited by Edward Mendelson).” The Georgia Review. Sprint, 2023, online edition.
Yamagata, Naoko. 2023. “Thetis and the Shield of Achilles – Reading the Iliad with Auden.” Chapter 16 (pp. 395-410) in Maciej Paprocki, Gary Vos, and David John Wright, eds. The Staying Power of Thetis: Allusion Interaction and Reception from Homer to the 21st Century. Sovereign of the Sea: the Staying Power of Thetis in the Greco-Roman World and Beyond (Conference). Berlin: De Gruyter. Cited by pdf page number in the open research online version.