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The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue
The first critical edition of a poem that named an era
When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety ―W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem―immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers.
This volume―the first annotated, critical edition of the poem―introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs's introduction and thorough annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.
When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety ―W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem―immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers.
This volume―the first annotated, critical edition of the poem―introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs's introduction and thorough annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1947
45 people are currently reading
2853 people want to read
About the author
W.H. Auden
617 books1,063 followersPoems, published in such collections as
Look, Stranger!
(1936) and
The Shield of Achilles
(1955), established importance of British-American writer and critic Wystan Hugh Auden in 20th-century literature.
In and near Birmingham, he developed in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent schools and studied at Christ church, Oxford. From 1927, Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship despite briefer but more intense relations with other men. Auden passed a few months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.
He then spent five years from 1930 to 1935, teaching in English schools and then traveled to Iceland and China for books about his journeys. People noted stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide attention at the age of 23 years in 1930 with his first book, Poems ; The Orators followed in 1932.
Three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 to 1938 built his reputation in a left-wing politics.
People best know this Anglo for love such as "Funeral Blues," for political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939," for culture and psychology, such as The Age of Anxiety , and for religion, such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." In 1939, partly to escape a liberal reputation, Auden moved to the United States. Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship to 1939. In 1939, Auden fell in lust with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage.
From 1941, Auden taught in universities. This relationship ended in 1941, when Chester Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship.
Auden taught in universities through 1945. His work, including the long For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror , in the 1940s focused on religious themes. He attained citizenship in 1946.
The title of his long The Age of Anxiety , a popular phrase, described the modern era; it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. From 1947, he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia. From 1947, Auden and Chester Kallman lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation and often collaborated on opera libretti, such as The Rake's Progress for music of Igor Stravinsky until death of Auden.
Occasional visiting professorships followed in the 1950s. From 1956, he served as professor at Oxford. He wintered in New York and summered in Ischia through 1957. From 1958, he wintered usually in New York and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.
He served as professor at Oxford to 1961; his popular lectures with students and faculty served as the basis of his prose The Dyer's Hand in 1962.
Auden, a prolific prose essayist, reviewed political, psychological and religious subjects, and worked at various times on documentary films, plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his controversial and influential career, views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as claim of Joseph Brodsky of his "greatest mind of the twentieth century."
He wintered in Oxford in 1972/1973 and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, until the end of his life.
After his death, films, broadcasts, and popular media enabled people to know and ton note much more widely "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," t
In and near Birmingham, he developed in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent schools and studied at Christ church, Oxford. From 1927, Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship despite briefer but more intense relations with other men. Auden passed a few months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.
He then spent five years from 1930 to 1935, teaching in English schools and then traveled to Iceland and China for books about his journeys. People noted stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide attention at the age of 23 years in 1930 with his first book, Poems ; The Orators followed in 1932.
Three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 to 1938 built his reputation in a left-wing politics.
People best know this Anglo for love such as "Funeral Blues," for political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939," for culture and psychology, such as The Age of Anxiety , and for religion, such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." In 1939, partly to escape a liberal reputation, Auden moved to the United States. Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship to 1939. In 1939, Auden fell in lust with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage.
From 1941, Auden taught in universities. This relationship ended in 1941, when Chester Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship.
Auden taught in universities through 1945. His work, including the long For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror , in the 1940s focused on religious themes. He attained citizenship in 1946.
The title of his long The Age of Anxiety , a popular phrase, described the modern era; it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. From 1947, he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia. From 1947, Auden and Chester Kallman lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation and often collaborated on opera libretti, such as The Rake's Progress for music of Igor Stravinsky until death of Auden.
Occasional visiting professorships followed in the 1950s. From 1956, he served as professor at Oxford. He wintered in New York and summered in Ischia through 1957. From 1958, he wintered usually in New York and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.
He served as professor at Oxford to 1961; his popular lectures with students and faculty served as the basis of his prose The Dyer's Hand in 1962.
Auden, a prolific prose essayist, reviewed political, psychological and religious subjects, and worked at various times on documentary films, plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his controversial and influential career, views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as claim of Joseph Brodsky of his "greatest mind of the twentieth century."
He wintered in Oxford in 1972/1973 and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, until the end of his life.
After his death, films, broadcasts, and popular media enabled people to know and ton note much more widely "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," t
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 61 reviews
July 19, 2016
The Age of Anxiety is one of Auden's greatest works, indeed probably one of the greatest poems of the Twentieth Century, but I do think the popular verdict is correct. It is a poem that is more fittingly respected than loved.
The poem is not sure what genre it is, which makes it both jungly diverse and plain cacophonous. I don't know enough about poetic forms to catch all of the references, but it is at least simultaneously a medieval quest/dream poem, an oblique account of World War II, a landscape poem, a mystical treatise, and a philosophical and psychological thought experiment, with hints of a murder mystery. I think it is safe to say that the poem does not succeed in accomplishing all of its tasks, but it cannot be faulted for leaving such a monstrous to-do list incomplete.
Almost the entire poem (and it is long!) is written in Medieval alliterative verse, but in thoroughly modern English. The result is a dissonant clash of registers. It's one of Auden's signature blends, the twin obscurantism of arcane sites of Western civilization and dated slang. I felt like I was reading a bizarre chimera of Piers Plowman and Casablanca. I must confess that I love alliterative verse, but I recognize that the whole technical enterprise was a bit... nerdy.
Theologically, the poem is an attempt to follow Kierkegaard down into the depths of our sin, cultivating the ancient spiritual practice of admitting just how f'ed up we really are. The poem is about 80% law and 20% gospel, but even that 20% of gospel is shown to be half-meant and play-acted. The result is a brutal assessment of Western culture's sickness in the middle of the twentieth century. And the diseases Auden diagnoses – consumerism, technology worship, information overload, propaganda as advertising, pervasive loneliness - have only intensified. It's not a happy poem.
But, perhaps undercutting the poem's bleakness is the poetry itself, which contains many bright miniature worlds dreamily interwoven into the poem's plot. (Although, to say that the poem even has a plot is a bit of an overstatement.)
After finishing The Age of Anxiety, I don't think I will return to it as often or with as much relish as I will some of Auden's other poems. Still, for anyone seriously interested in Auden or culture care, it is essential reading.
PS The introduction is by Alan Jacobs, and, as with pretty much everything else the man writes, it is amazing and worth reading on its own.
The poem is not sure what genre it is, which makes it both jungly diverse and plain cacophonous. I don't know enough about poetic forms to catch all of the references, but it is at least simultaneously a medieval quest/dream poem, an oblique account of World War II, a landscape poem, a mystical treatise, and a philosophical and psychological thought experiment, with hints of a murder mystery. I think it is safe to say that the poem does not succeed in accomplishing all of its tasks, but it cannot be faulted for leaving such a monstrous to-do list incomplete.
Almost the entire poem (and it is long!) is written in Medieval alliterative verse, but in thoroughly modern English. The result is a dissonant clash of registers. It's one of Auden's signature blends, the twin obscurantism of arcane sites of Western civilization and dated slang. I felt like I was reading a bizarre chimera of Piers Plowman and Casablanca. I must confess that I love alliterative verse, but I recognize that the whole technical enterprise was a bit... nerdy.
Theologically, the poem is an attempt to follow Kierkegaard down into the depths of our sin, cultivating the ancient spiritual practice of admitting just how f'ed up we really are. The poem is about 80% law and 20% gospel, but even that 20% of gospel is shown to be half-meant and play-acted. The result is a brutal assessment of Western culture's sickness in the middle of the twentieth century. And the diseases Auden diagnoses – consumerism, technology worship, information overload, propaganda as advertising, pervasive loneliness - have only intensified. It's not a happy poem.
But, perhaps undercutting the poem's bleakness is the poetry itself, which contains many bright miniature worlds dreamily interwoven into the poem's plot. (Although, to say that the poem even has a plot is a bit of an overstatement.)
After finishing The Age of Anxiety, I don't think I will return to it as often or with as much relish as I will some of Auden's other poems. Still, for anyone seriously interested in Auden or culture care, it is essential reading.
PS The introduction is by Alan Jacobs, and, as with pretty much everything else the man writes, it is amazing and worth reading on its own.
May 15, 2022
Numbers and nightmares have news value.
Atmospheric and ontological-- a director's cut Dasein which stirs, if not celebrates a modern mind during wartime. Think The Changing Light at Sandover or Gravity's Rainbow for blackout curtains and survival myths amidst the huddled intellectuals. Yet I am guessing the quartet of protagonists here aren't poets but just those happening to gather around a campfire with blithe awareness, hazarding by necessity perhaps that The world needs a wash and a week's rest. Chance meetings in a bar lead to a cab and a nightcap.
It was the Perkins History of Modern Poetry which led me here. I am glad. Auden gives us a mirror for what Žižek cautions in our liberal age when stare in horror at a live feed from muddy fields to the east.
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
The epic ends with the four taking their leave, forgetting at once the profundity they occasioned. Such it appears is a backhanded blessing or a curse of our condition.
Atmospheric and ontological-- a director's cut Dasein which stirs, if not celebrates a modern mind during wartime. Think The Changing Light at Sandover or Gravity's Rainbow for blackout curtains and survival myths amidst the huddled intellectuals. Yet I am guessing the quartet of protagonists here aren't poets but just those happening to gather around a campfire with blithe awareness, hazarding by necessity perhaps that The world needs a wash and a week's rest. Chance meetings in a bar lead to a cab and a nightcap.
It was the Perkins History of Modern Poetry which led me here. I am glad. Auden gives us a mirror for what Žižek cautions in our liberal age when stare in horror at a live feed from muddy fields to the east.
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
The epic ends with the four taking their leave, forgetting at once the profundity they occasioned. Such it appears is a backhanded blessing or a curse of our condition.
July 18, 2017
My first, but certainly not last, Auden. Stunning.
July 28, 2024
“In 1944, in New York City, against a background of a changed and frightening world, the finest – and most controversial – English poet of the day began work on a new long poem. On its publication three years later it would garner some of the worst reviews he ever got and leave many of his devotees cold: while TS Eliot hailed it as "his best work to date", the Times Literary Supplement deemed it "his one dull book, his one failure". It would inspire a symphony and a ballet and win the Pulitzer prize. It was the last long poem he would write. "The Age of Anxiety" is the strangest flower of a marvellously fertile period…..” (Glynn Maxwell)
Langland's Piers the Plowman provides the mythical silhouette to this work of Auden. The complete poem was published October 1947. This poem is one of the most demonstrative works of Auden. It owes its implication to the fact that it characterizes the exceptional expansion of the poet's responsiveness in addition to the temper of the times in which it was produced.
In this long poem of six sections, including a Prologue and an Epilogue, Auden rejoices the two primary facts of human existence:
a) the growing sense of guilt and b) anxiety in man's life and his craving for innocence.
The principal leitmotif deals with the universal condition of the fallen man's life in time, and his yearning for the anonymous Eden he has lost, with particular stress on its accentuation in modern times. This poem is an inimitable poetic allegory of the quandary of man in the modern age.
This poem is a sympathetic satire on the attempts of human beings to escape through their own efforts, the anxiety of our age. In the opinion of the poet the anxiety is a religious phenomenon.
“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
Though apprehension is a marvel which is felt by all men of all ages, it is strengthened in our civilization with its letdown of tradition and belief. This condition is further amplified in wartime, when everybody is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person, when the most judicious become celebrants of chance.
In the poem, Auden takes four characters whom he perceives of as representative in their miscellaneous origins and their common desperation, of the 'lonely crowd of twentieth century men and their civilization:
1) There is Quant, a "tired old widower" of Irish descent, an intelligent and well-read clerk in a shipping office;
2) Malin, who has grown sick of his "disjointed and mechanical..... exhausting and idle" work Intelligence Officer as a Medical in the Canadian Air Force;
3) Rosetta, a no longer young but still attractive lower middle-class Jewess, who has become a successful buyer in a department store, but spends her time in nostalgic day dreams of a "country" English childhood she never had; and
4) Emble, an easy going but uneasy young man in the Navy, who is "fully conscious of the attraction of his uniform to both sexes".
“For the others, like me, there is only the flash
Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one
Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass
To meet one’s madness”
These characters meet in a bar on All Souls' night. They are drawn together by a mutual hopelessness and loneliness and by an attraction both hetero and homosexual. They return to Rosetta's flat, to celebrate the beginning of the love affair between Rosetta and Emble. The older men depart. Emble falls asleep. Rosetta resigns herself to her continued segregation, and the Eclogue closes with the echoes of the two men who have left them.
At the same time as this this occurs, they experience, during their conversation in the bar, a counterpointing spiritual pilgrimage, which fails as their actual meeting fails.
The key of the whole piece is in fact that of Quant's opening soliloquy in the bar; he speaks only to his reflexion in the glass.
All of the characters try similarly break out of their isolation but speak only to their double-the reflex of their ego in the glass of the world around them.
In this work, Auden has reached his furthest distance from the notion of art as "Mimesis" art seen, that is, as taking value from its immediate relationship to a re-enacted, recreated experience.
In the definition he invented carlier of art as "an abstract model of ...... dead experience ", the term "abstract model" has come largely to outweigh the term "dead experience".
In this work there occurs the first marked appearance of Auden as lexicologist-a man delightedly exploring the uses of unusual words."
Gorge on these lines from Maxwell: “Throughout the piece instruments explode into life, peter out suddenly or are drowned out by others, yet the same fragile theme struggles on. This gives the symphony the concision and cohesion wanting in the poem. It is short (for a symphony) and electrifying. Its voices hear each other. And if the grand closing chords seem more resolved than anything at the end of the poem – notwithstanding Malin's Christian optimism as his train crosses the Manhattan bridge at sunrise – perhaps, at that point where genius in language and music meet, only the latter can seem to mend what's broken…”
This most dazzling poem contains almost every form of literary inclination, save that of motive force. It is entertaining, often astute, and sometimes poignanjt. Trust me, you’d simply fall in love with the characterisation of Rosetta. The poem covers passages of lyrical or symbolic narrative that are as fine, in a different mode, as any of Auden's earlier landscapes; and its unadulterated verbal adroitness, its linguistic fertility and assortment, do much to authenticate the ambitiousness of the entire effort.
And yet, somehow I feel that the attempt fails.
It seems improbable that ‘The Age of Anxiety’ will be ever the most read of Auden's works, though it shows so many of his verbal talents at their richest; and the cause must lie in its measured and chosen departure into a landlocked and unreachable area of art.
Why so?
It is tad trying, multidimensional and opulent.
Only a minuscule section of the 21st century poetry-readers want to go inside such serious detail.
Langland's Piers the Plowman provides the mythical silhouette to this work of Auden. The complete poem was published October 1947. This poem is one of the most demonstrative works of Auden. It owes its implication to the fact that it characterizes the exceptional expansion of the poet's responsiveness in addition to the temper of the times in which it was produced.
In this long poem of six sections, including a Prologue and an Epilogue, Auden rejoices the two primary facts of human existence:
a) the growing sense of guilt and b) anxiety in man's life and his craving for innocence.
The principal leitmotif deals with the universal condition of the fallen man's life in time, and his yearning for the anonymous Eden he has lost, with particular stress on its accentuation in modern times. This poem is an inimitable poetic allegory of the quandary of man in the modern age.
This poem is a sympathetic satire on the attempts of human beings to escape through their own efforts, the anxiety of our age. In the opinion of the poet the anxiety is a religious phenomenon.
“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
Though apprehension is a marvel which is felt by all men of all ages, it is strengthened in our civilization with its letdown of tradition and belief. This condition is further amplified in wartime, when everybody is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person, when the most judicious become celebrants of chance.
In the poem, Auden takes four characters whom he perceives of as representative in their miscellaneous origins and their common desperation, of the 'lonely crowd of twentieth century men and their civilization:
1) There is Quant, a "tired old widower" of Irish descent, an intelligent and well-read clerk in a shipping office;
2) Malin, who has grown sick of his "disjointed and mechanical..... exhausting and idle" work Intelligence Officer as a Medical in the Canadian Air Force;
3) Rosetta, a no longer young but still attractive lower middle-class Jewess, who has become a successful buyer in a department store, but spends her time in nostalgic day dreams of a "country" English childhood she never had; and
4) Emble, an easy going but uneasy young man in the Navy, who is "fully conscious of the attraction of his uniform to both sexes".
“For the others, like me, there is only the flash
Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one
Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass
To meet one’s madness”
These characters meet in a bar on All Souls' night. They are drawn together by a mutual hopelessness and loneliness and by an attraction both hetero and homosexual. They return to Rosetta's flat, to celebrate the beginning of the love affair between Rosetta and Emble. The older men depart. Emble falls asleep. Rosetta resigns herself to her continued segregation, and the Eclogue closes with the echoes of the two men who have left them.
At the same time as this this occurs, they experience, during their conversation in the bar, a counterpointing spiritual pilgrimage, which fails as their actual meeting fails.
The key of the whole piece is in fact that of Quant's opening soliloquy in the bar; he speaks only to his reflexion in the glass.
All of the characters try similarly break out of their isolation but speak only to their double-the reflex of their ego in the glass of the world around them.
In this work, Auden has reached his furthest distance from the notion of art as "Mimesis" art seen, that is, as taking value from its immediate relationship to a re-enacted, recreated experience.
In the definition he invented carlier of art as "an abstract model of ...... dead experience ", the term "abstract model" has come largely to outweigh the term "dead experience".
In this work there occurs the first marked appearance of Auden as lexicologist-a man delightedly exploring the uses of unusual words."
Gorge on these lines from Maxwell: “Throughout the piece instruments explode into life, peter out suddenly or are drowned out by others, yet the same fragile theme struggles on. This gives the symphony the concision and cohesion wanting in the poem. It is short (for a symphony) and electrifying. Its voices hear each other. And if the grand closing chords seem more resolved than anything at the end of the poem – notwithstanding Malin's Christian optimism as his train crosses the Manhattan bridge at sunrise – perhaps, at that point where genius in language and music meet, only the latter can seem to mend what's broken…”
This most dazzling poem contains almost every form of literary inclination, save that of motive force. It is entertaining, often astute, and sometimes poignanjt. Trust me, you’d simply fall in love with the characterisation of Rosetta. The poem covers passages of lyrical or symbolic narrative that are as fine, in a different mode, as any of Auden's earlier landscapes; and its unadulterated verbal adroitness, its linguistic fertility and assortment, do much to authenticate the ambitiousness of the entire effort.
And yet, somehow I feel that the attempt fails.
It seems improbable that ‘The Age of Anxiety’ will be ever the most read of Auden's works, though it shows so many of his verbal talents at their richest; and the cause must lie in its measured and chosen departure into a landlocked and unreachable area of art.
Why so?
It is tad trying, multidimensional and opulent.
Only a minuscule section of the 21st century poetry-readers want to go inside such serious detail.
July 10, 2009
most under-rated of all the late audens.
written in alliterative. icelandic / old english meters transmogrified into anxious etiolate mongrel doggerel.
written in alliterative. icelandic / old english meters transmogrified into anxious etiolate mongrel doggerel.
June 2, 2015
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948) is a long poem in 6 parts, by W. H. Auden, written mostly in a modern version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. The poem deals, in eclogue (a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject) form, with man's quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialized world.
Set in a wartime bar in New York City on All Soul’s night, Auden’s four characters Quant, a shipping clerk; Rosetta, "a buyer for a big department store"; Emble, a navy man; and Malin, a Canadian air force pilot, meet in a bar where "everybody is reduced to the status of a shady character or a displaced person." After getting to know one another as they sit at the bar, the group moves to a booth, where they undertake a sort of vision quest through an imaginary landscape. Eventually, they go to Rosetta's house for a nightcap, where Emble and Rosetta begin a flirtation. After a short while, Quant and Malin slip away, leaving Emble and Rosetta to amorous pursuits, which are cut short when Emble passes out.
What about anxiety? The anxiety stems from the overpowering nature of the war, which interferes with humans' rights and abilities to live naturally through the ages and the stages described in the poem. Try as we might, with alcohol and other distractions, we cannot escape the powers that be, as Auden reminds us with the brilliant use of the radio in the bar, which squawks at certain intervals, interrupting the speech of the characters with pronouncements such as--
"Now the news. Night raids on
Five cities. Fires started
Pressure applied by pincer movement
In threatening thrust.
Third Division
Enlarges beachhead."
I found his writing both beautiful and, at times, challenging.
Set in a wartime bar in New York City on All Soul’s night, Auden’s four characters Quant, a shipping clerk; Rosetta, "a buyer for a big department store"; Emble, a navy man; and Malin, a Canadian air force pilot, meet in a bar where "everybody is reduced to the status of a shady character or a displaced person." After getting to know one another as they sit at the bar, the group moves to a booth, where they undertake a sort of vision quest through an imaginary landscape. Eventually, they go to Rosetta's house for a nightcap, where Emble and Rosetta begin a flirtation. After a short while, Quant and Malin slip away, leaving Emble and Rosetta to amorous pursuits, which are cut short when Emble passes out.
What about anxiety? The anxiety stems from the overpowering nature of the war, which interferes with humans' rights and abilities to live naturally through the ages and the stages described in the poem. Try as we might, with alcohol and other distractions, we cannot escape the powers that be, as Auden reminds us with the brilliant use of the radio in the bar, which squawks at certain intervals, interrupting the speech of the characters with pronouncements such as--
"Now the news. Night raids on
Five cities. Fires started
Pressure applied by pincer movement
In threatening thrust.
Third Division
Enlarges beachhead."
I found his writing both beautiful and, at times, challenging.
August 8, 2013
Rampant alliteration to no useful (communicative) end. In fact, it gets in the way.
December 17, 2017
Any difficulty in understanding cannot be laid at the feet of the author. That said, I won't claim perfect comprehension, but I consider it worthwhile to read. I was only because of Leonard Bernstein that I knew about this poem, so I have him to thank. Now it's on to the symphony.
The soliloquy by Rosetta is a high point.
The soliloquy by Rosetta is a high point.
October 14, 2017
“Ho guardato dalle finestre di un Mondo caduto,
[…] i nostalgici, piccoli, ostinati singhiozzi
Delle cose precipitate nell’esistenza.” (p. 167)
[…] i nostalgici, piccoli, ostinati singhiozzi
Delle cose precipitate nell’esistenza.” (p. 167)
April 7, 2020
“The fears we know Are of not knowing.”
July 11, 2020
pretty banging tbh
November 14, 2024
This poem deserves a reread, as it is largely over my head. There are glimmers of beauty and laughter, peeking out from the mists of poetic ephemera.
December 8, 2025
A sobering picture of modernity, in beautiful verse, if a bit esoteric at times.
May 27, 2021
Absolutely silly use of alliteration, and sort of pedantic, but otherwise incredible
July 14, 2025
Fear not: the critical edition from Princeton University Press certainly does not perform an unncessary amount of demystification. Auden's long, impassioned and pseudo-narrative poem retains so much abstruse potency. For me, the flashes of clarity -- the usage of straight-forward narrative prose to structure the dense verse -- is what makes this so delectable. A textual note points out a supposed refrence to Finnegans Wake in the long morning-after poem from Rosetta, which can give you a sense of where Auden's head and intentions where at (maybe not coincidentally, this is one of the best sections of the work referencing one of the best sections of Joyce's work).
The Age of Anxiety is a dark night of the soul(s) work (or rather dark night of an All Soul's Night, to be precise) -- much like how the Wake was a book of the night, of the free-flowing associations of hazy dreams. If Joyce was mainly indulging in a Viconian wellspring, Auden's is Arcadian. (The discussion of Arcadian matters was the most illuminating topic of the (quite good) introduction in this edition. I've been mulling over this stuff a lot recently). Even the title of the poem seems to invite this comparison -- to the sort of cyclical essence of Vico as influential to Joyce. Meanwhile, Audeb's use of four characters sketched from heady (Jungian) psychology, conversing while monologuing in flights of fancy, recalls Woolf's The Waves. The employment of Anglo-Saxon meters and medieval alliterative verse juxtaposes stunningly with his contemporary setting. Of course, there's a universality of the human experience. But there is also a sort of majestic and fantastical thing that occurs, when our four characters go on their journey -- literal and liguistic -- and venture through settings, sometimes hazier homages to Piers Plowman's 'field full of folk'. While Auden's journey is notably abstract, we think of the Orphic, the hero's journey, all sorts of things that move in the same sort of shape. That wonderful aforementioned morning-after poem, where Rosetta is looking down at Emble's sleeping body, is as difficult to comprehend as the majority of The Age of Anxiety's verse. However, this doesn't stop it from being enormously evocative. It is the majestic poetry of all possible possibility, melancholically conjured and set during a time of great upheaval and uncertainty -- an age not just of anxiety, but of foreboding uncertainty.
The Age of Anxiety is a dark night of the soul(s) work (or rather dark night of an All Soul's Night, to be precise) -- much like how the Wake was a book of the night, of the free-flowing associations of hazy dreams. If Joyce was mainly indulging in a Viconian wellspring, Auden's is Arcadian. (The discussion of Arcadian matters was the most illuminating topic of the (quite good) introduction in this edition. I've been mulling over this stuff a lot recently). Even the title of the poem seems to invite this comparison -- to the sort of cyclical essence of Vico as influential to Joyce. Meanwhile, Audeb's use of four characters sketched from heady (Jungian) psychology, conversing while monologuing in flights of fancy, recalls Woolf's The Waves. The employment of Anglo-Saxon meters and medieval alliterative verse juxtaposes stunningly with his contemporary setting. Of course, there's a universality of the human experience. But there is also a sort of majestic and fantastical thing that occurs, when our four characters go on their journey -- literal and liguistic -- and venture through settings, sometimes hazier homages to Piers Plowman's 'field full of folk'. While Auden's journey is notably abstract, we think of the Orphic, the hero's journey, all sorts of things that move in the same sort of shape. That wonderful aforementioned morning-after poem, where Rosetta is looking down at Emble's sleeping body, is as difficult to comprehend as the majority of The Age of Anxiety's verse. However, this doesn't stop it from being enormously evocative. It is the majestic poetry of all possible possibility, melancholically conjured and set during a time of great upheaval and uncertainty -- an age not just of anxiety, but of foreboding uncertainty.
August 2, 2019
This is a very interesting and beautiful book. Despite the fact that large sections of the content went over my head, I never lost interest thanks to the amazing musicality (Auden uses a hybrid of O.E., Medieval, and Romantic devices and forms throughout the poem) and the wonderfully, and at times playfully, surreal imagery.
The appendix and introduction of this edition were also useful, as they contained scholarly writing on the meters and rhyme schemes of O.E.— which I am not very familiar with.
The appendix and introduction of this edition were also useful, as they contained scholarly writing on the meters and rhyme schemes of O.E.— which I am not very familiar with.
September 10, 2017
The conversations sparked by attempting to make sense of this poem were far more interesting than the poem itself. Auden was clearly writing for a self-contained audience that was both fascinated by its own cleverness and deluded into thinking it actually had anything in common with and could speak to the average person.
December 15, 2012
Wow. I am going to read this again as soon I have a few days to do more pondering.
September 27, 2021
This is the first work by Auden that I have read and came to it after reading ‘In Parenthesis’ by David Jones, another long poem about war, in the case of ‘In Parenthesis, the First World war. Other than both writers being influenced by their interest in medieval literature, in Auden’s case both English and Norse, and the theme of war, there is little in either theme or style to link the works. Jones provides extensive notes on the literary references and unfamiliar language of his own poem, making it much more accessible to the reader than ‘The Age of Anxiety’ which reflects an intellectual standpoint so idiosyncratic that, without the notes provided by Alan Jacobs, I would have been left floundering (not being over familiar either with the Zohar or Auden’s modifed version of Jung’s psychological types, in which the categories of introvert and extravert are replaced by Arcadians and Utopians).
As happens not infrequently when i read poetry, focus on the verse form distracts me from following any narrative. Auden’s use of Old English/Norse alliterative verse forms initially held my attention so much that reading and re-reading was required to get even a basic grasp of any meaning. Once used to that alliterative form, it is possible to appreciate just how extraordinarily how supple and expressive Auden can be within the discipline of his chosen structure. The exchanges between the four characters, with the narratorial additions, achieve a dramatic, even filmic, quality. It is easy to imagine it as a stage play. Beyond the meanings that can be quarried from Auden’s intellectual sources, his language and especially the freshness that comes from his opaque lexical choices make this a pleasure to read, especially out loud. Some of those choices, one gleans from the notes, may derive more from their sound and loose associations and less from any precise meaning. (Consider for example ‘dungarees with Danish buttons’ - p. 151 - which Jacobs notes could not be associated with a ‘forgotten memory’ of a Birmingham manufacturer and was likely, therefore, to be Auden’s own invention). While this poem would be far less accessible without the notes of Alan Jacobs, there is a notable lapse in his commentary on Quant’s speech, after a fall, urging Miss ME to trot “over the hill now into Abraham’s bosom” (p. 106). Jacobs suggests that this is an image of heaven, taken from Luke, 16: 22-23 (p. 142) however, this reference to ‘Abraham’s bosom’ is more likely to refer to purgatory than heaven as this Biblical text is one of the few scriptural authorities for purgatory - see Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Birth of Purgatory’ pp. 42-3.
As happens not infrequently when i read poetry, focus on the verse form distracts me from following any narrative. Auden’s use of Old English/Norse alliterative verse forms initially held my attention so much that reading and re-reading was required to get even a basic grasp of any meaning. Once used to that alliterative form, it is possible to appreciate just how extraordinarily how supple and expressive Auden can be within the discipline of his chosen structure. The exchanges between the four characters, with the narratorial additions, achieve a dramatic, even filmic, quality. It is easy to imagine it as a stage play. Beyond the meanings that can be quarried from Auden’s intellectual sources, his language and especially the freshness that comes from his opaque lexical choices make this a pleasure to read, especially out loud. Some of those choices, one gleans from the notes, may derive more from their sound and loose associations and less from any precise meaning. (Consider for example ‘dungarees with Danish buttons’ - p. 151 - which Jacobs notes could not be associated with a ‘forgotten memory’ of a Birmingham manufacturer and was likely, therefore, to be Auden’s own invention). While this poem would be far less accessible without the notes of Alan Jacobs, there is a notable lapse in his commentary on Quant’s speech, after a fall, urging Miss ME to trot “over the hill now into Abraham’s bosom” (p. 106). Jacobs suggests that this is an image of heaven, taken from Luke, 16: 22-23 (p. 142) however, this reference to ‘Abraham’s bosom’ is more likely to refer to purgatory than heaven as this Biblical text is one of the few scriptural authorities for purgatory - see Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Birth of Purgatory’ pp. 42-3.
January 7, 2021
This work is unlike any other. But that’s not necessarily a compliment.
The book features four people, but they are more like disembodied voices of mystic mumbling than coherent, well-defined characters that one can sympathize with (or understand). Their cryptic, indistinct imagery and poetry flows over the reader in an oddly beautiful but rather incomprehensible jumble of words.
The work is very static – it feels like a stack of words that don’t really go anywhere. At the end, the character Malin is “reclaimed by the actual world where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no interest.” (p. 108) That kind of speaks to the odd separateness of the entire poem.
At heart, the book appears to mean to be a mystical poem, inspired by a Jewish mystical text. It’s very dense, and rather obscure. What is one to make of lines like these?
Let brazen bands abrupt their din and
Song grow civil, for the siege is raised.
The mad gym-mistress, made to resign,
Can pinch no more. (p. 93)
Outside these decisions the cycles of Nature
Revolved as usual, and voluble sages
Preached from park benches to passing fornicators
A Confucian faith in the functional society. (p. 105)
Unfortunately, I’m not much for mystical writings. I think it someone spent some hours studying the work, it might prove rather interesting. But it wasn’t compelling enough for me to want to dig in deeper.
The book features four people, but they are more like disembodied voices of mystic mumbling than coherent, well-defined characters that one can sympathize with (or understand). Their cryptic, indistinct imagery and poetry flows over the reader in an oddly beautiful but rather incomprehensible jumble of words.
The work is very static – it feels like a stack of words that don’t really go anywhere. At the end, the character Malin is “reclaimed by the actual world where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no interest.” (p. 108) That kind of speaks to the odd separateness of the entire poem.
At heart, the book appears to mean to be a mystical poem, inspired by a Jewish mystical text. It’s very dense, and rather obscure. What is one to make of lines like these?
Let brazen bands abrupt their din and
Song grow civil, for the siege is raised.
The mad gym-mistress, made to resign,
Can pinch no more. (p. 93)
Outside these decisions the cycles of Nature
Revolved as usual, and voluble sages
Preached from park benches to passing fornicators
A Confucian faith in the functional society. (p. 105)
Unfortunately, I’m not much for mystical writings. I think it someone spent some hours studying the work, it might prove rather interesting. But it wasn’t compelling enough for me to want to dig in deeper.
August 18, 2024
This poem didn't live up to my expectations of it. I love the idea of it--four strangers in a New York City bar during World War II talking about their anxieties, their lives, their emotions, their shames, and their beliefs, sharing a moment of fleeting connection in an isolating age--but for my tastes, it was just too esoteric and vague. W. H. Auden has long been one of my favorite poets, but I have to shamefully admit that this poem really went over my head. (However, I think my inability to follow what was going on was heavily impacted by the misfortune that I had to wait more than a week before I had the time and was in the head space to tackle the second half of the poem, by which time I had lost the atmosphere and characters of the poem and had to go back and reacquaint myself with the first few parts.) However, there's no doubt the language is beautiful and there's some individual stanzas and lines that I loved.
I would highly recommend reading the introduction before reading the poem. I normally save introductions for the end because I don't want my first impression of a book colored by what critics think of it, but in this case the introduction gives a lot of context that I really wish I had had before reading the poem.
I would highly recommend reading the introduction before reading the poem. I normally save introductions for the end because I don't want my first impression of a book colored by what critics think of it, but in this case the introduction gives a lot of context that I really wish I had had before reading the poem.
January 26, 2025
Since "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness" here is a short attempt at saying thank you to Auden:
“O Auden offer, with awe and with wit,
A judgment of our dreary and jejune times;
Define our dearness, our darkness, and grant
Sure hope in the heap of our unhappy days;
Give a Word to rule this weary world,
To make it, move it, and masterfully end it,
Providing a path in the myths of our passions
And beauty to break down our boredom and fear.
O lend some truth that lasts and is loving
To us, unsubstantial and stumbling stuff.”
Then falling from the fog of failure and distress,
Comes that captain cry, wooing,
Shining, shattering, “Shema Yisrael,
Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.”
The creed of creation, the cradle of love,
The place of peace and the pearl of great
Price. And turning toward the TV,
Where a common preacher recalls the cross,
One says, serenely and strangely awake,
“Here is the heart of the whole matter,
My mystery, my meaning, my movement, my truest
Self; salvation in every sense of the word.”
And passing happily over the parapet of pain
He goes to bed, in a beatitude of bliss and rest.
“O Auden offer, with awe and with wit,
A judgment of our dreary and jejune times;
Define our dearness, our darkness, and grant
Sure hope in the heap of our unhappy days;
Give a Word to rule this weary world,
To make it, move it, and masterfully end it,
Providing a path in the myths of our passions
And beauty to break down our boredom and fear.
O lend some truth that lasts and is loving
To us, unsubstantial and stumbling stuff.”
Then falling from the fog of failure and distress,
Comes that captain cry, wooing,
Shining, shattering, “Shema Yisrael,
Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.”
The creed of creation, the cradle of love,
The place of peace and the pearl of great
Price. And turning toward the TV,
Where a common preacher recalls the cross,
One says, serenely and strangely awake,
“Here is the heart of the whole matter,
My mystery, my meaning, my movement, my truest
Self; salvation in every sense of the word.”
And passing happily over the parapet of pain
He goes to bed, in a beatitude of bliss and rest.
January 30, 2023
Wow.
Ever read something and have all the furniture in your brain rearranged?
This is a book-length poem written in the aftermath of World War II, asking how are we to experience the world after we have used the technological advances of industrialization and modernity to bring about so much horror and death. Is there beauty any more? Does literature matter? What of God and politics?
The sections which trace a man, from birth to death, as he embraces politics which encourage the annihilation of people who are unlike him (and therefore not “truly” human) are particularly haunting.
An excoriating indictment of all of our worst impulses and behaviors, and still particularly relevant today. So rich and dense and magnificent.
Ever read something and have all the furniture in your brain rearranged?
This is a book-length poem written in the aftermath of World War II, asking how are we to experience the world after we have used the technological advances of industrialization and modernity to bring about so much horror and death. Is there beauty any more? Does literature matter? What of God and politics?
The sections which trace a man, from birth to death, as he embraces politics which encourage the annihilation of people who are unlike him (and therefore not “truly” human) are particularly haunting.
An excoriating indictment of all of our worst impulses and behaviors, and still particularly relevant today. So rich and dense and magnificent.
November 6, 2020
I like the alliterative verse, Anglo-Saxon style, and that he does skillfully and effectively.
The "baroque" aspect works less well, in that there's decoration and sound effects all over the place, most of which is OK enough, but the message he's trying to convey is so hidden behind allusion, indirection, and playfulness, that I just couldn't follow where he's going in large parts of it.
I read the whole poem with commentary twice, and the second time made more sense, but it is still distant to me.
The masque at Rosetta's apartment and her last, big speech were the best parts, the most approachable and memorable.
The "baroque" aspect works less well, in that there's decoration and sound effects all over the place, most of which is OK enough, but the message he's trying to convey is so hidden behind allusion, indirection, and playfulness, that I just couldn't follow where he's going in large parts of it.
I read the whole poem with commentary twice, and the second time made more sense, but it is still distant to me.
The masque at Rosetta's apartment and her last, big speech were the best parts, the most approachable and memorable.
July 9, 2020
I read The Age of Anxiety because it was discussed in a book I read back in May about how Christian intellectuals had grappled with the crisis of the Second World War. This is a very strange poem, and most of the time I wasn't sure what to make of it. There were some good lines here and there. It does have a reputation for expressing the anxiety of its age, which I trust it does. But I didn't find much that I could make use of in our own anxious time.
July 5, 2023
Even if we had time
To read through all the wrinkled
Reports of explorers who claim
That hidden arrant streams
Chuckle through this chapped land
In profound and meagre fissures,
Or that this desert is dotted with Oases where acrobats dwell
Who make unbelievable leaps,
We should never have proof they were not Deceiving us. For the only certain
Truth is that they returned,
And that we cannot be deaf to the question:
"Do I love this world so well
That I have to know how it ends?"
To read through all the wrinkled
Reports of explorers who claim
That hidden arrant streams
Chuckle through this chapped land
In profound and meagre fissures,
Or that this desert is dotted with Oases where acrobats dwell
Who make unbelievable leaps,
We should never have proof they were not Deceiving us. For the only certain
Truth is that they returned,
And that we cannot be deaf to the question:
"Do I love this world so well
That I have to know how it ends?"
January 20, 2020
I liked it. Will have to re-read. Some interesting ideas and the four, five if we count the narrative voice, work well. Not at all easy to understand, more challenging than his shorter works. In some ways reminded me of Eliott's The Wasteland or even Ulysees. The confusion equating to a certain anxiety.
January 23, 2020
Age of Anxiety is the kind of book I enjoy not so much because I like the story or its characters (in that way, I didn't really like it all that much at all). Instead, I enjoyed pondering and discussing the ideas which underlie the narrative. It's a fascinating book to consider and think on, even if the tone is a little more bleak and gray than I normally like.
December 3, 2022
Speaks to the post second wield war works as poems like the waste land spoke into the first, a n evocation of lost ness , lack of meaning , and industrial horror punctuated by glimpses of light in altruism and timelessness expressed both in faith and in primal mythology, and real love and human connection when found.
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