Key Facts: 

• Writer: W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)
• Original Title: Musée des Beaux Arts (French for “Museum of Fine Arts”)
• Written: December 1938 (during Auden’s visit to Brussels, Belgium)
• First Published: 1939 in the journal New Writing, later in Another Time (1940)
• Form: Free verse poem (no fixed rhyme or meter; two stanzas)
• Genre: Modernist / Reflective poem
• Tone: Calm, ironic, thoughtful, and reflective
• Point of View: Third-person observer (the poet as a viewer of art and human life)
• Total Lines: About 21 lines
• Total Parts: Two stanzas
• Place Setting: Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels)
• Time Setting: Late 1930s, on the eve of World War II