"The Unknown Citizen" is a poem written by W. H. Auden in 1939, shortly after he moved from England to the United States.
The poem was first published on January 6, 1940 in The New Yorker, and first appeared in book form in Auden's collection Another Time (Random House, 1940).
[1] The poem is the epitaph of a man identified only by a combination of letters and numbers, JS/07/M/378, who is described entirely in external terms: from the point of view of government organizations such as the fictional "Bureau of Statistics."
His employer is "satisfied," his union "reports he paid his dues", his mates are found to like him, and the press are pleased with his buying papers daily and responding to the ads.
In Auden's poem, the entire system and society are responsible for the loss of individualism, whether or not government was the initial cause of the decline.