Musée des Beaux Arts (poem)

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"Musée des Beaux Arts" (French for "Museum of Fine Arts") is a 21-line poem written by W. H. Auden in December 1938 while he was staying in Brussels, Belgium, with Christopher Isherwood. It was first published under the title "Palais des beaux arts" (Palace of Fine Arts) in the Spring 1939 issue of New Writing, a modernist magazine edited by John Lehmann. It next appeared in the collected volume of verse Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940), which was followed four months later by the English edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1940). The museum is famous for its collection of Early Netherlandish paintings. When Auden visited the museum he would have seen a number of the paintings of the "Old Masters" referred to in the second line of the poem, including the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus which at the time was still regarded as an original by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The poem describes, through the use of Bruegel's paintings, humankind's indifference to the suffering of others...

Read on Wikipedia · Image After Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain