Each of his modern Americans speaks, most of the time, in long speeches of alliterative tetrameter, an English form so old as to suggest firelight and the mead-hall. There they drink some more and dance a bit until the two older gents drift home and the younger one pledges undying love to Rosetta before crashing out on her bed.īetween these mundane characters and what Auden requires of them stretches a dizzying gulf. In real terms they get talking at the bar, grab a booth together, get plastered and stagger back to Rosetta's place.
Over six sections – a prologue, a life-story, a dream-quest, a dirge, a masque and an epilogue – they meditate on their lives, their hopes, their losses, and on the human condition. It is in "September 1st, 1939" that we first glimpse the setting for what would become "The Age of Anxiety":Īt the outset of "The Age of Anxiety" Auden spotlights four of these faces, solitary drinkers in a wartime New York bar: Malin, a Canadian airman Quant, a world-weary clerk Rosetta, a buyer for a department-store and Emble, a young naval recruit. like a . ." But there'll always be an England. scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a. There are still, remarkably, some who believe Auden's gift deserted him when he left England on the eve of the second world war, as if this perceived treachery to the motherland crippled him creatively, but another reason for this position is suggested by the words of Anthony Powell on Auden's death in 1973, as reported by Kingsley Amis, with whom Powell was breakfasting: "I'm delighted that shit has gone. And the great – and latterly disavowed – lament for a falling world "September 1st, 1939". The decade following WH Auden's emigration to New York in 1939 produced not only the long poems "For the Time Being", "New Year Letter" and "The Sea and the Mirror" – his sublime meditation on The Tempest – but some of the finest works of this or any 20th-century poet: "In Memory of WB Yeats", "At the Grave of Henry James", "If I Could Tell You", "The Fall of Rome", "The Quest". "The Age of Anxiety" is the strangest flower of a marvellously fertile period. It was the last long poem he would write. It would inspire a symphony and a ballet and win the Pulitzer prize. On its publication three years later it would garner some of the worst reviews he ever got and leave many of his devotees cold: while TS Eliot hailed it as "his best work to date", the Times Literary Supplement deemed it "his one dull book, his one failure".
I n 1944, in New York City, against a background of a changed and frightening world, the finest – and most controversial – English poet of the day began work on a new long poem.
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