WH Auden Age Of Anxiety

Copyrighted Material
INTRODUCTION
The
Poem
The Age of A nxiety begins in fear and doubt, but the four protagonists find some comfort in sharing their distress.
In
even this accidental and temporary community there arises the possibility of what Auden once called
“local
understanding.”
Certain
anxieties may be overcome not by the altering of geopolitical conditions but by the cultivation of mutual sympathy—perhaps mutual love, even among those who hours before had been strangers.
The Age of Anxiety is W.
H.
Auden’s last booklength poem, his longest poem, and almost certainly the leastread of his major works. (“It’s frightfully long,” he told his friend
Alan
Ansen.)
It
would be interesting to know what fraction of those who begin reading it persi st to the end. The poem is strange and oblique; it pursues in a highly concentrated form many of
Auden’s
longterm fascinations. Its meter imitates medieval alliterative verse, which
Auden
had been drawn to as an undergraduate when he attended J.R.R.
Tolkien’s
lectures in AngloSaxon philology, and which clearly influences the poems of his early twenties. The Age of Anxiety is largely a psychological, or psychohistorical, poem, and these were the categories in which
Auden
preferred to think in his early adulthood
(including
his undergraduate years at Oxford, when he enjoyed the role of confi dential amateur analyst for his friends). The poem also embraces Auden’s interest in, among other things, the archetypal theories of Carl
Gustav
Jung,
Jewish
mysticism,
English
murder mysteries, and the linguistic and cultural differences between
England
and
America.
Woven through it is his nearly lifelong obsession with the poetic and mythological
“green
world”
Auden
variously
calls