The Age of Anxiety by W. H. Auden

First published: 1947

Type of work: Poetry

The Poem

W. H. Auden was one of the outstanding poets of the twentieth century. He had not only the vision and skill of a major poet but also the necessary luck, or perspicacity, to create poetry that many of his contemporaries felt spoke for them. He spoke their language, he had the “sound” of the 1930’s, and he found that sound early. He played a part in shaping the decade because his words and ideas shaped many of the people who influenced the course of events. Auden went on composing poetry for another thirty years and more, but he made his mark when he was barely thirty years old.

Auden was born in 1907 in England, where he continued to live until emigrating to the United States in 1939 just before World War II broke out in Europe. He studied at Oxford, publishing his first book of poems in his early twenties and several more in his next decade. He also published plays, some of which were given radio performance, and he supported himself by teaching school; once in the United States, he took temporary positions at a number of colleges.

Although Auden never stopped challenging his readers, his work began to lose currency during the 1940’s. His career peaked early, and while his early success guaranteed him a substantial readership for the remainder of his days, many felt that his career was on a downward slope in later years.

Auden wrote The Age of Anxiety right after World War II. Its setting recalls “September 1, 1939,” the poem he wrote on the outbreak of that war, which begins

I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-Second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade.

It is as though the poet were completing a circuit after a hiatus of several years, although there is little other similarity between “September 1, 1939” and The Age of Anxiety. The former is driven urgently by the need to respond to the impending cataclysm after Germany invaded Poland. The Age of Anxiety, on the other hand, although it, too, is set during World War II, was actually written more than a year after the war’s end. The poem contains many passages that are amusing, entertaining, and instructive, but overall the work feels desultory and undermotivated. Many critics agree that it is not among Auden’s finer achievements.

To understand the attractiveness of Auden’s earlier work, it needs to be seen against the backdrop of its immediate precursors, principal among them the poems of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H. D., Marianne Moore, and Edith Sitwell among the modernists, and Robert Graves, John Betjeman, and W. B. Yeats among those who opposed the modernist temper. The figure of the long-lived Thomas Hardy, born in 1840 but still writing poems during the 1920’s, also looms large in this configuration. Auden took it upon himself to create a poetry that reconciled these various camps.

Auden’s innovations were characteristically paradoxical. He kept up with the innovators of the previous generation by returning innovation to traditional measures. He resuscitated many old forms and gave them a contemporary aspect. He was particularly fond of, and adroit with, Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, verse techniques, bringing their heavy alliteration and paucity of articles into play while presenting a modern landscape or theory. The Age of Anxiety shows this technique, as in the passage with Auden’s rendering of a radio bulletin during World War II:

Now the news. Night raids onFive cities. Fires started.Pressure applied by pincer movementIn threatening thrust. Third DivisionEnlarges beachhead. Lucky charmSaves sniper. Sabotage hintedIn steel-mill stoppage. Strong point heldBy fanatical Nazis. Canal crossedBy heroic marines.

Auden uses four “n” sounds in the first of these lines, two “f” sounds in the second, three “p” sounds in the third, and so on. He combines the Anglo-Saxon tendency to do without articles, with an up-to-date telegrammatic manner appropriate to news headlines. As in many other poems by Auden, there is a good deal of contemporary slang from the 1940’s as well as topical references to such objects as jukeboxes and radios. Auden thus spans the entire history of the English language.

The Age of Anxiety is called a Baroque eclogue; traditionally, an eclogue is a pastoral dialogue between bucolics who are really erudite and sophisticated persons playing at being bucolics. They go—or pretend to go—to the country for refreshment and relaxation, then return to town renewed. Auden’s eclogue is Baroque insofar as it resembles a style in art and architecture from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries in Europe, a style marked by strict forms and elaborate ornamentation.

The bucolics in The Age of Anxiety are four people who meet in a bar one evening during World War II. They are Quant, an older man and an Irish emigré; Malin, also older and a medical intelligence officer on leave from the Canadian Air Force; Rosetta, who is probably in her thirties, was raised in Britain, and is now a successful buyer for an American department store; and Emble, a young and handsome U.S. sailor. In part 1, the prose part of the prologue, Auden provides a historical frame (World War II) that is also timeless (wartime). During a war, Auden tells us, bar business booms, and “everyone is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person, and becomes a worshiper of chance.” They seek out “an unprejudiced space in which nothing particular ever happens”—a bar.

It is All Hallows’ Eve. First one character, then the next, speaks to himself or herself his or her thoughts. When the radio delivers a wartime news bulletin, memories of the war revive in the four characters. Rosetta then speaks, permitted to do so by the common topic of the news. The others respond, and shortly they are engaged in a discussion of the present. After another radio bulletin, they decide to share a round of drinks. Malin begins to wax metaphysical—“Let us then/ Consider rather the incessant Now of/ The traveller through time. . . .” The alcohol makes them convivial, and they move from bar stools to a booth.

Part 2, “The Seven Ages,” does not have much to do with war but consists of the quartet’s various responses to, and reflections upon, human fate as seen through its seven stages: childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, the struggle to succeed, success and recognition, the beginning of senescence, and old age sliding into death. (Of course, the fact of war casts its shadow over the entire recitation.)

Sobered and scared by the picture they have jointly conjured, they turn to Rosetta, the only woman, for consolation, but she can offer only the comfort of the “regressive road to Grandmother’s House.” Part 2 ends with the bucolics getting drunker, seeking out “that state of prehistoric happiness which, by human beings, can only be imagined in terms of a landscape bearing a symbolic resemblance to the human body.” In their separate fantasies, although this is not clear to the reader at the time, they imagine themselves together encountering what ensues.

Part 3, “The Seven Stages,” consists of their imaginary wanderings—alone, all together, or in various pairings—across a countryside and through a city, commenting upon the symbolism of the mythic landscapes. The stages of the title are the episodes of this journey but also the settings where their journey plays itself out. Finally, they find themselves facing the last half of the seventh stage, a desert of Joshua trees and giant cacti, and anxiously ask themselves if they are, against all odds, about to succeed in completing this dream quest. Their fears are confirmed: “For the world from which their journey has been one long flight rises up before them now.” They come to themselves; the bartender is flicking the lights on and off, as it is closing time. Rosetta invites them back to her place for a snack and a nightcap, and they all accept.

Part 4, “The Dirge,” occurs as the quartet shares a cab uptown. It is a stately, highly alliterative poem in dancing measures for whoever spares them from the dangers of the wilderness, of praise and lament “for such a great one who . . . has always died or disappeared.”

Part 5, “The Masque,” plays out at Rosetta’s apartment. Quant and Malin sing; Rosetta and Emble dance, feeling their casual attraction grow. Later, they kiss and exchange vows in stychomythic alternation. After some high-spirited interchanges among the four, Quant and Malin decide that the time comes to depart. Rosetta escorts them to the elevator. When she returns, Emble passes out on her bed. Rosetta—half sad, half relieved—soliloquizes above his sleeping body, to the effect that it is all for the best and that their encounter will remain forever a lovely dream, safe from the slow erosion of suburban reality. In Part 6, “Epilogue,” Quant and Malin bid each other goodnight and each goes home alone with his thoughts, returned to his solitary condition.

Auden begins his Baroque eclogue not in some grand European park but in a setting that recalls the bar life of midtown Manhattan, a life Auden knew well. He loved New York, and he became a U.S. citizen (he is often classified as an American poet), but, of course, he remained more British than not. In The Age of Anxiety, for example, written six years after he had emigrated, three of his four characters are not native Americans, and the landscapes are often British; moreover, the use of Americanisms accords uneasily with the prevailing English diction.

Through its very pervasiveness, Auden’s heavy use of alliteration, which in this work brings along with it a diction that suggests the Anglo-Saxon origins of modern English, overwhelms distinctions between characters. Yet, this is not a play in the dramatic sense of the term, but rather an “entertainment,” where the pretense of the actors should be allowed to show.

Part 3 aside—which is confusing and unnecessarily mystifying as characters hop in and out of airplanes, boats, and trains—The Age of Anxiety contains many delights for the fans of Auden. The work features many of his familiar devices, his logical reversals, clever puns, philosophical nuggets, and irreverent asides. For the student of verse forms, it offers a wide variety of formal techniques that Auden either revived or invented.

Bibliography

Bloomfield, Barry, and Edward Mendelsohn. W. H. Auden: A Bibliography, 1924-1969. 2d ed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972. Excellent and thorough bibliography.

Callan, Edward. Auden, a Carnival of Intellect. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Full, sound study of Auden’s life and works. Callan views Auden as a “professional” poet rather than one seeking constant inspiration. Discusses the wide range of Auden’s forms and techniques and defines his “perennial themes” to be consciousness and the human condition.

Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden, a Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Gives a detailed account of the poet’s life and situates the works in relation to it. Good primary and secondary bibliographies.

Gottlieb, Susannah Young-ah. Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. A comparison of the works of the two authors, including an analysis of the meditations on Nazi terror in The Age of Anxiety and in Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. Gottlieb also interprets Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone,” concentrating on the messianic elements in the work.

Rosen, David. Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Rosen analyzes works by Auden, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats, describing how they and other British poets tried to present themselves as persons of power and the moral voices of their communities.

Smith, Stan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Collection of essays about Auden, including discussions of his life and character, the various genres of his work, religion, politics, and his influence upon other writers.

Spender, Stephen, ed. W. H. Auden: A Tribute. New York: Macmillan, 1975. Essays by those who knew Auden in England—Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly, and Christopher Isherwood—and those who knew him principally in America—John Hollander, Chester Kallman, Oliver Sacks, and others.