“Musée des Beaux Arts” was written by British poet W. H. Auden during a December 1938 stay in Brussels. It was inspired by a collection of Flemish artist Pieter Breughel the Elder’s paintings in Belgium’s Royal Museums of Fine Arts. The poem was first published in the Modernist magazine New Writing (Spring 1939) under the title “Palais des Beaux Arts.” It appeared again in Auden’s book Another Time (1940)—the first written after he emigrated to the United States in 1939. The work collects poems written between 1936 and 1939 and includes “Funeral Blues,” “The Unknown Citizen,” and “Spain 1937,” among other famous works.

“Musée des Beaux Arts” is a free verse poem that displays Auden’s command of traditional formal technique, his humor, and keen powers of observation. It is one of the best known of the 400 poems he wrote during his lifetime. It focuses on the nature of human suffering and perception.

Poet Biography

Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February 21, 1907 in York, England. His father was a physician, and his mother had trained as a missionary nurse. Both were devout Anglicans. The family moved to Birmingham in 1908 when his father was appointed to a medical position in the city. His father served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I, and the family seldom saw him until he returned in 1918.

In 1915, Auden started at St. Edmund’s preparatory school in Surrey. There he met his lifelong friend, future novelist Christopher Isherwood, though the two wouldn’t become close until later. After he finished at St. Edmund’s, Auden entered Gresham’s School, a Norfolk religious school focused on science. At the school, he lost his faith and discovered he wanted to be a poet. He read Hardy, Dickinson, Frost, Edward Thomas, and A. E. Housman.

Though his skill with poetry was recognized early, Auden earned a scholarship in natural science. In 1925 he began university at Christ Church, Oxford, to study biology. He switched to English in his second year and discovered T. S. Eliot’s poetry—a major influence on his developing style.

At Oxford, he and a group of artists including Geoffrey Grigson, Isherwood, and C. Day Lewis became a part of what was known as the Auden Circle. Though it wasn’t an official organization, and Auden later tried to distance himself from it, the artists shared common artistic values: “Its participants were characterized by their use of less floridly experimental literary styles than those prevalent in the 1920s; by a main left-of-centre political stance; and, to some extent by an ethos of sexual dissidence” (Jenkins, Nicholas. “Auden Group.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008). Auden co-edited the 1926 and 1927 editions of Oxford Poetry. His first book of poems, a pamphlet printed by Stephen Spender, was published in 1928. He graduated from Oxford that same year.

After college, he wrote poetry, dramatic works with Isherwood, and moved around, sometimes taking teaching jobs. He watched the political unrest in Berlin and elsewhere and wrote some socialist-leaning poems. Auden married Erika Julia Hedwig Mann, the daughter of Thomas Mann, in 1935 to give her a British passport and an escape from Nazi Germany. Auden was gay and Mann a lesbian, and while they lived apart, they remained friends and never divorced.

In 1937, Auden spent a short time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, working in the censor’s office. In 1938, he and Isherwood traveled to China and Japan to write a travel book for Auden’s publishers. In 1938, Auden was in Brussels and went to New York the following year. In April of 1939, he met and fell in love with Chester Kallman, a man he’d remain attached to for the rest of his life.

Auden moved to the United States and became a citizen. He continued to write, teach, and travel in Europe. He found religion again in the early 1940s following the death of his mother and romantic troubles with Kallman.

In 1948, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his seventh book of poetry, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947). In 1955, his ninth collection, Shield of Achilles (1954), received a National Book Award for Poetry. He would write five more books of poetry before his death from heart failure in September 1973. A posthumous collection, Thank You, Fog: Last Poems by W. H. Auden, was published in 1974.

Poem Text

Auden, W. H. “Musée des Beaux Arts.” 1939. Emory University.

Summary

The poem opens with the speaker commenting on the paintings of the Old Masters. In particular, he says they understood how human suffering happens while other people are going about their daily business, “eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” (Line 4). He expands the idea by first describing one of the museum’s paintings. Though the speaker doesn’t identify it by name, the details match Breughel’s The Census at Bethlehem. The speaker highlights the contrast between those awaiting the “miraculous birth” (Line 6) of Jesus and a group of indifferent children “skating / On a pond at the edge of the wood” (Lines 7-8). The speaker then references a second unnamed but identifiable painting. The Massacre of the Innocents depicts the “dreadful martyrdom” (Line 10) of early Christians while horses and dogs continue with their lives, untouched by the event.

The second stanza continues to explore the idea by specifically looking at a third Breughel painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In it, “everything turns away” (Line 14) from Icarus’s fall. Maybe the tragedy had been seen or heard, but the boy’s plunge wasn’t “an important failure” (Line 17) to the ploughman figure or to the “expensive delicate ship” (Line 19). Neither pauses nor reacts. Instead, the ploughman continues his work and, as the last line says, the ship “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on” (Line 21).