To what extent do you regard 'The Shield Of Achilles' as characteristic of Auden's work as whole?

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To what extent do you regard 'The Shield Of Achilles' as characteristic of Auden's work as whole?

At first glance Auden's poem the 'Shield of Achilles' appears to be focused on the classical world. The poem's classical nature is first indicated by the title- Achilles was of course a famous Greek hero, and throughout the poem there are further classical references, many of which Auden has taken from Book XVIII of Homer's Iliad- 'Marble well-governed cities' (l.3), '...athletes at their games' (l.46), 'Hephaestos, hobbled away' (l.61). However, the poem also combines these classical details with the modern world- 'Proved by statistics' (l.17), 'Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot' (l.31). Although there is this unusual combination of classical and modern, the poem can be seen as timeless:

Column by column in a cloud of dust

They marched away enduring a belief

Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

('The Shield of Achilles' ll.21-23)

Here the army who are 'enduring a belief' (l.21) that they are doing good can be as easily applicable to the modern day (i.e. the situation in Iraq) as to classical times. The timeless nature of the poem can