 The poem is the title work of "The Shield of Achilles", a collection of poems in three parts, published in 1955, containing Auden's poems written from around 1951 through 1954.It begins with the sequence "Bucolics", then miscellaneous poems under the heading "In Sunshine and In Shade", then the sequence "Horae Canonicae".It won the U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1956.