Auden's "The Age of Anxiety"

I’ve read Auden flittingly over the years, never really stopping long enough to engage him properly. In an attempt to better familiarize myself with him as a person and prepare to at last deep-dive into the poetry, I once tried to read Edward Mendelson’s celebrated biography Early Auden/Later Auden but just couldn’t get it going (I think at the time my mind wasn’t ready to do much heavy-lifting). Yet, Auden’s work has certainly spoken to me, particularly his masterful “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” “As I Walked Out One Evening,” too, is a gem. I’ve taught both.

This past week, encouraged by BBC Radio 4’s outstanding 3-part series on Auden and with the aid of Princeton University Press’s annotated edition (ed., Alan Jacobs), I read very carefully through his “Anxiety,” having been forewarned by the BBC series it was perhaps his most uphill read: heavy going, rather impenetrable, probably his least-read long poem, as opposed to, say, “For the Time Being” and “The Sea and the Mirror.” It was heavy-going and impenetrable, at least by me, but it was also delightful. I can’t say the notes of the Princeton edition helped that much; Jacobs’s introduction certainly did. These last two long poems are next on my Auden reading list; both fortunately are also given the Princeton treatment.

Wikipedia provides a good synopsis (requiring some editing). It’s a poem “in six parts […] written mostly in a modern version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, […] in eclogue form [focusing on] man's quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialized world. [It’s set] in a wartime bar in New York City [with] four characters – Quant, Malin, Rosetta, and Emble […] The poem won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948.”

I won’t go further go into the ‘content’ of the poem. There are epic quests, Jungian archetypes, a dirge, a masque, all sorts of late-Modernist concerns. The characters don’t arrive anywhere so much as pass through experience, forming and breaking bonds. Auden’s technical facility, alone, is worth the poem’s admission price — his deep interest in prosodic effect, his eager allowing of influence re allusion and voice. Bravura, naturally, is the word to employ here re performance. “Anxiety” pulls you down, deeply, into a series of dreams, visions, altered states of consciousness, yet you never feel abandoned by the poet; you understand you’re in good hands, hands attempting to point out or carry instead of deceive, trying out some sleight of hand. In other words, the poem doesn’t lack; one must do one’s best in the presence of brilliance. If the light is too bright in the eyes, it’s our task, if we choose to accept it, to grow accustomed to it.

All of which, of course, is not really a critical take on the poem. I have none. It’s a work I would need to come back to, several times, over a course of years, before being able to write anything sensible about it. Meanwhile, I look forward to stepping into that particular dive bar again, in the middle of the war, to hover over those characters’ heads, listening to lines like these:

. . . life after life lapses out of
Its essential self and sinks into
One press-applauded public untruth
And, massed to its music, all march in step
Led by that liar, the lukewarm Spirit
Of the Escalator