Auden’s previous long poem had been called “The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest,“ and Shakespeare haunts this poem too. Woven through it is his nearly lifelong obsession with the poetic and mythological “green world” Auden variously calls Arcadia or Eden or simply the Good Place. 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. 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 confidential amateur analyst for his friends). Tolkien’s lectures in AngloSaxon philology, and which clearly influences the poems of his early twenties. Its meter imitates medieval alliterative verse, which Auden had been drawn to as an undergraduate when he attended J.R.R. The poem is strange and oblique it pursues in a highly concentrated form many of Auden’s longterm fascinations.
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 persist to the end. 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 begins in fear and doubt, but the four protagonists find some comfort in sharing their distress.