Auden's The Age of Anxiety

The Age of Anxiety has the dubious distinction of being one of Wystan Hugh Auden's most-cited and perhaps least-read works. If anything will bring the book-length poem out of obscurity, this new edition, edited and with an introduction by Alan Jacobs, will. It will not be an easy task.

Nearly 40 years after his death, Auden remains a primary figure in Anglophone poetry. His masterly "September 1, 1939," a lament inspired by Germany's invasion of Poland published a month after the event, has circulated again in recent years among American intellectuals who see it as a fitting comment on the current zeitgeist, despite its datedness. That poem is an interesting partner to The Age of Anxiety, published in 1947, as both unfold in bars in New York City, haunts that would have been familiar to Auden, who first moved to the United States from England in 1939 and settled in Manhattan after enlisting in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which studied the psychological impact of Allied bombing campaigns on Germany.

Whereas the narrator of "September 1, 1939" is alone "in one of the dives/ On Fifty-Second Street/ Uncertain and afraid," The Age of Anxiety is peopled with four characters who meet in a bar and deliver monologues that shift from thought to speech.

Superficially, the premise of The Age of Anxiety is quite simple: On All Soul's Night, 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. This is a night during wartime, when, as Auden explains in one of several prose interludes in the poem, "everybody is reduced to the anxious 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.

Auden's characters are derived from his studies of Jung. The poet attempted to distill these types into language and set them in interrelation. But ultimately, these characters are simply foils for Auden's ideas, which no matter how brilliant - or brilliantly expressed - are often unclear.

One gets the feeling large concepts are being explored in the poem, but it feels like an exploration rather than an explanation. When Auden writes, for example, "So it was now as they sought 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," we are forced to take his words at face value, though we're not sure why or to what consequence. Generally, however, Auden's style carries the day.

Auden is widely known as a master of form, and The Age of Anxiety offers ample proof. Written in Old English meter, the lines largely consist of nine syllables. Rather than rhyme, Auden relies on two or three alliterations per line, as evident in lines such as "Our bodies bound to these bar-room lights,/ the nights odors, the noise of the El on/ Third Avenue, but our thoughts are free ..."

This dependence on alliteration doesn't call as much attention to itself as one might think. Instead, it offers the lines a sense of cohesion and propels the poem along on high diction.

The subtitle to the poem, "A Baroque Eclogue," alludes to Virgil, whose Eclogues depict shepherds or herdsmen who meet in pastoral settings and converse. Auden's alliterative form brings much of the baroque ornamentation to the poem, as does his ardent use of symbolism and metaphysics. The best of these passages, in which Auden's linguistic adornment fuses with the seedy elegance of the bar in which the poem begins, are magic, written with a magnetic eye for the common details of places and people and with a mastery of language fit for the noblest subject matter. In such passages, Auden's social vision, sweeping yet acute, overcomes his metaphysical intentions, and the poem is truly great in the public, visionary sense of the word:

"But the new barbarian is no uncouth/ Desert-dweller; he does not emerge/ From fir forests; factories bred him;/ Corporate companies, college towns/ Mothered his mind, and many journals/ Backed his beliefs."

Yet those passages are washed over with a sea of murky concepts. A large portion of the poem is taken with descriptions of "The Seven Ages" and "The Seven Stages," similar in ways to what Shakespeare describes in As You Like It, but steeped in Jungian metaphysics. It is clear Auden had huge ambitions for the poem, but they seethe beneath the surface of the language rather than clarifying themselves to the reader.

So what about the anxiety? The title of the poem, which is nowhere therein mentioned explicitly, brought critics to laud the poet for capturing the tenor of the age. Yet the poem is more subtle and certainly more ambiguous than the title suggests.

Anxiety permeates the words and thoughts of the characters in the poem, but not in a way that rises to social commentary. The anxiety stems, of course, 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."

It is not only the radio that sneaks into the conversation of these would-be merrymakers, but life's dreadful lack of meaning, which infects the thoughts of Auden's characters even as they keep talking to fight off that dread. As Quant says, "We are mocked by unmeaning; among us fall/ Aimless arrows, hurting at random/ As we plan to pain."

The Age of Anxiety is a brilliant conception and intimidating in its ambitions. Purely as a poem, however, it is most of interest for students and scholars, as it is weighed down with metaphysics - the sort of depths that one reaches when not concerning oneself with what is most immediate.

Unlike "September 1, 1939," in which references to Luther and Thucydides, among others, forward a central point about the rise of Hitler, The Age of Anxiety is like a beer glass filled with single malt - not impossible to get to the bottom of, but not a joy to, either. Even Jacobs nearly admits as much in his introduction, which deftly unpacks the poem's central themes and symbols while tracing some of the strands from Auden's own biography that inspired it.

While The Age of Anxiety may be one of Auden's most complex and ambitious poems, it is not one of his most successful nor his most enjoyable. 

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com