Book: The Age of Anxiety

Overview

W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947) is a book-length poem set in wartime New York that traces a single night in the lives of four strangers who meet by chance in a bar. Through their intertwined monologues and dreamlike excursions, the poem anatomizes the spiritual dislocation, cultural fragmentation, and existential dread of the modern era. Written largely in an austere, Old English, inflected alliterative measure, it fuses classical pastoral with urban modernity, turning a chance encounter into a metaphysical inquiry. The work won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and quickly became a touchstone for postwar disillusionment.

Setting and Characters

The poem opens in a Third Avenue bar during World War II, a liminal shelter in a city under blackout. Four figures converge: Malin, an analytic, detached observer; Quant, a middle-aged businessman wary of intimacy; Rosetta, a sophisticated and self-aware New Yorker; and Emble, a young serviceman wavering between bravado and vulnerability. They are sketched less as social types than as psychic coordinates, each voicing a distinct strategy for coping with loneliness and fear. Alcohol loosens their speech, and the bar becomes a confessional where surface chatter gives way to stark self-scrutiny.

Structure: From Prologue to Epilogue

Auden organizes the poem in a sequence of emblematic movements, Prologue, The Seven Ages, The Seven Stages, The Dirge, The Masque, Epilogue, each refracting the group’s talk into broader allegory. The Seven Ages recasts the Shakespearean life-cycle as a modern taxonomy of consciousness, with the speakers mapping out infancy, youth, maturity, and age as states of spiritual orientation rather than mere chronology. Their riffs blend anthropology, psychology, and theology, suggesting that contemporary people pass through phases defined by anxiety’s shifting disguises.

The Seven Stages transforms the barroom into a shared interior journey. In a composite, imaginary landscape, half subway, half desert, they pursue a quest for a common homeland of meaning. Each stage dramatizes a different temptation: to surrender to mass culture, to hide in private daydreams, to outsource judgment to systems and slogans. The Dirge laments a lost unity of self and society, using choral cadences to mourn the modern person’s estrangement from tradition and God.

Night’s Afterpieces

Eventually the quartet leaves the bar for Rosetta’s apartment, where The Masque unfolds as a surreal, semi-comic pageant of desires and roles. Masks and music convert private fantasy into theatrical display, but even celebration exposes the limits of performance: intoxication cannot simulate communion. As dawn approaches, embarrassment and fatigue settle in. The Epilogue returns each character to solitude, the city resuming its anonymous flux. Nothing dramatic has happened; yet the night has revealed the pattern of their defenses and the possibility, still tentative, of a more honest self-knowledge.

Themes and Style

Auden’s central preoccupation is the hunger for meaning in a secular, technologized world. The poem balances diagnosis and hope: it inventories neuroses, distraction, self-absorption, nostalgia, while insisting that ethical attention and mutual recognition remain possible. Its baroque eclogue form juxtaposes pastoral yearning with urban reality, and its shifting meters and alliterative textures enforce a disciplined music, somber, incantatory, precise. Theology shades the argument without dogmatism; psychology offers insight without absolution.

Legacy

The Age of Anxiety crystallized a mood that outlived the war, giving a name to a century’s chronic unease. Its dramatic method, hybrid form, and moral urgency influenced mid-century poetry and inspired later works, most famously Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2. Auden’s strangers part at dawn unchanged in circumstance but changed in awareness, and the poem leaves its readers in a comparably disquieting light, alert to the costs of modern life and to the fragile dignity of seeking meaning together.