The Age of Anxiety

MR. AUDEN’S long poem (138 pages subtitled “A Baroque Eclogue”) examines four anxious people’s tempers on a night of All Souls during the late war in the “pastoral” settings of a Third Avenue bar and a Manhattan apartment. The “shepherds,” who speak almost entirely in nine-syllable lines of alliterative verse, are: Quant, a shipping clerk, whose uneasiness is introspective and expressed in sardonically distorted mythologies: Malin, a Canadian Air Force Medical Intelligence officer, who is pained by the incompatibilities between the facts of war and his academically flavored truths; Rosetta, a department store buyer, whose feminine reveries reflect the emptiness of her independence; and Emble, an American Naval officer, whose spiritual instability yearns for compensatory triumphs, preferably sexual.

Their themes are illusion and frustration. They seek out their own souls, and honoring the ceremony of the day, they supplicate for all men, both in the pure rhetoric of “The Seven Ages" and in the dream-journey of “The Seven Stages” of man. They lament the absence of a Superhuman Grace in “The Dirge”; they perform “The Masque,” which presages happiness for all in the mating of Rosetta and Emble; they end in an “Epilogue,” where each goes his way, and the source, as well as the only resolution, of “the infinite impetus of anxious souls” is pronounced. Christ alone will save, and not in this life.

As no single stratagem will relieve the tension of the “Age,” so Mr. Auden’s virtuosities sparkle variously throughout the volume. His indictment of American materialism stands in the glittering diction of our own speech, polished by the poet’s wit until the clangings of the alliterative verse ring like the cymbals of The Hucksters. There are pieces of pure lyricism and perhaps no one now writing can juxtapose the materials of pure poetry and the prose of the actual world better than Mr. Auden. Airplanes, cars, and bicycles are the conveyances of the phantasy-travels; the protagonists of restlessness are personalities whose removal from and immersion in the American state of affairs both point the paradox of their tensions and the frustrating lack of direction.

The integration of the poem is even more impressive than the magic of its many incidental gems. The themes conclude on an otherworldly note, but leaving aside the rather late entrance of theology, The Age of Anxiety is very much of this earth. While rejoicing the admirers of his purely poetical abilities, Mr. Auden has, at the same time, woven the patterns in the world-spirit of uneasiness into an argument the logic of which may be nearly irrefutable to anyone who has felt “modern” anxieties in his heart.

WALTER ELDER