Jonathan Emmesedi<p>In recent years people have been reading - or re-reading - Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" in the hope that it might shed light on what is happening in our time, even though it was published just under three quarters of a century ago, in 1951. </p><p>The following year saw the publication of W.H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles”. Like Arendt’s book, Auden’s poem was shaped by the horrors of the decades preceding its publication, yet it too can still offer our age insight.</p><p><a href="https://c.im/tags/HannahArendt" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>HannahArendt</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/WHAuden" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WHAuden</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/TheShieldOfAchilles" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TheShieldOfAchilles</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/PoliticalThought" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PoliticalThought</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Poetry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Poetry</span></a></p><p><a href="https://poets.org/poem/shield-achilles" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">poets.org/poem/shield-achilles</span><span class="invisible"></span></a></p>