The Age of Anxiety

The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue is a long poem in six parts set in a wartime bar in New York City, where four strangers, Quant, Malin, Rosetta and Emble, meet, drink and talk their way through a single night. W. H. Auden builds the whole poem in a modern version of Anglo Saxon alliterative verse, a deliberately archaic form he revives and adapts for a distinctly mid twentieth century subject, the four characters searching for some stable sense of identity and meaning inside a wartime, increasingly industrialized world that offers them very little of either.

The eclogue form, traditionally a dialogue among shepherds or rustic figures, becomes in Auden's hands a container for genuinely contemporary anxieties, displaced people talking in a displaced setting, their conversation ranging across memory, desire and the difficulty of finding real substance in a modern life that keeps dissolving into abstraction. Auden's formal choice, that revived alliterative meter, gives even casual seeming dialogue a weighted, incantatory quality, so the poem's four voices never quite sound like ordinary wartime bar conversation even as they never entirely leave that setting behind.

Reading The Age of Anxiety means moving through a genuinely difficult long poem, formally strange by the standards of most 1940s American verse and demanding close attention to keep track of which of the four voices is speaking and why. It suits a reader drawn to poetry engaging directly with wartime dislocation and the era's particular flavor of existential unease, and one willing to work through an unfamiliar meter for a payoff that later composers and choreographers found compelling enough to adapt into other art forms entirely.