And the World Keeps Spinning: A Conversation Between Auden and Gluck

Thirty years separate the poems “Musée des Beaux Arts” and “Palais des Artes”, and yet one has clearly been influenced by the other. In the “Musée des Beaux Arts”, W. H. Auden starts by describing suffering in relation to painting and introduces his argument that the greatest sufferings are generally gone unnoticed. He specifically uses Breughel’s painting of Icarus as an example for his argument. “Palais des Artes”, on the other hand, does not try to make a general argument, but instead exemplifies Auden’s argument by presenting a garden-like scene where a greater drama is happening between a woman and a man but no one else in the scene notices. Auden argues that the world will keep turning regardless of what great tragedy is taking place, as can be seen in the fall of Icarus which is only a small part of the bigger painting by Breughel. Glück agrees with his theory by creating a poem in which the biggest drama plays a minor role and the main focus is on daily life. These two poems are combined not only by their underlying theories but also through their verb tenses, format and parallel situations.