SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

often enough to become a social truth. The “not knowings” as Pfhol calls them dismember the
“the socially patterned possibilities” 17 inherent in the act of reading to interpret a poem. These
poems, as collages, are literally glued together into stanzas using other people’s words or
paraphrasing of historical materials. Thus, Gioia’s vers collage, following and expanding on
Kees’, collocates signs and/as language; images and/as interpretations; and the realistic and/as
the absurd to test the ends of remarking language for no real purpose. Pushing back from the
table, the reader can also say, “I came. I saw. I went away.” going forth with an emptiness in
realizing as Peggy Lee sang:” That’s all there is” to these poems.
The Shield of Language: W.H. Auden and Frederick Turner
In its third iteration, the vers collage of W.H. Auden and of Frederick Turner achieve the
maximum range by collocating two separate poems into one inorganic whole. Anthony Hecht
describes Auden’s 1955 book, The Shield of Achilles as “the most clearly and formally
composed volume Auden ever produced” 18 and no where is this more evident than in the title
poem. In “The Shield of Achilles” Auden composes the poem in two different forms, using four
octet trimeter stanzas for the description of the shield, and five seven line rhyme royale stanzas
for the contemporary sections which create the tension in the poem. The shield stanzas show
turbulence in their metrical substitutions while the modern time stanzas are all regular. The
poem is visibly collage, and addresses the changing perceptions of warfare and heroism across
time. Auden offers a double poem, for a “double reading” showing the two sides of the shield
of Achilles and its war and peace images. In this he illustrates how collage makes no attempt
to merge disparate materials or elements beyond a “temporary [re] composition” 19 on the
canvas and on the page.
As vers collage, the two poems in two forms, interrogates itself. Thetis, who commissioned a
shield to protect her son Achilles, has a different interpretation of war from the blacksmith,
Hephestos, who is forging the shield. To her, war always ends in victory, as evidenced in her
vision of a pastoral empire performing ceremonial rituals of peace. What she is confronted with
on the other side of the shield is a barren “weed-choked field” (Stanza 3, line 8) foreshadowing
Achilles’ death (Stanza 4, line 8). Within the four shield stanzas, Auden uses the couplet that
ends each to propel his theme of fantasies versus the realities of war.
The five contemporary stanzas question the ideal of heroism. Readers are told “a crowd of
ordinary decent folk” has gathered either passively or submissively for the firing squad
execution of three men who are shamefully humiliated by their captors before their deaths:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
An apparent witness, “the ragged urchin,” attempts to and fails to kills a bird with a stone
about the same time. Steeped in violence, he has “ . . . never heard/Of any world where
promises were kept/Or one could weep because another wept.” As a post World War II poem,
“The Shield of Achilles” uses a work of art and a set of cultural beliefs in parallel acts of
remembrance. The poem appeals to visual and tactile senses, as its aims to “disinFORM” or
disabuse the reader of any sense of surety; just as Thetis is forced to question her assumptions.
Frederick Turner extends the Audenesque vers collage as he, too, unravels “an existing
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