Another great video interpretation by Jim Avis, this time of my comics adaptation of W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” The reading is by the poet himself. Auden’s oft-anthologized poem is thought to obliquely criticize the Western powers’ ignoring of Hitler’s expansion into Czechoslovakia in 1938, and the comic and the animation include references to other instances when Western public opinion largely turned its back on foreign tragedies that its government’s had largely contributed to provoking: The “death flights” employed by the Argentinian military dictatorship of 1976-1983 and the sinking of refugee ships in the Mediterranean in recent years.

This comics adaptation, along with 23 others, can be found in my new book, Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry (Plough Publishing): https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/poetry/poems-to-see-by