Musée des Beaux Arts

Musée des Beaux Arts, poem by W.H. Auden, published in the collection Another Time (1940). In this two-stanza poem that starts “About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters,” Auden comments on the general indifference to suffering in the world. Written in a tone of critical irony, the poem asserts that anguish is most accurately represented in art as a commonplace feeling and not as a dramatic emotion of tragic proportions. In the first stanza,...