Reading W.H. Auden's Age of Anxiety in Our Age of Angst

     Among the most quoted and likely the least read works of modern poetry is W.H. Auden's deep and insightful The Age of Anxiety.  Readers who need some help with the richness of this modern poetic masterpiece, you now can get the the first critical edition and annotated volume of Auden's The Age of Anxiety since the original publication.  Similar to Eliot's The Waste Land, this poem requires some deep attention and assistance.  Scholar Alan Jacobs introduces this important work to a new prospective generation of open readers by placing the poem within the historical and biographical context, and providing numerous references to potential obscurities.  Alan Jacobs's introduction and informed annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that deserves a place among the Great Books of the Western World.

     When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety was Auden's longest, and clearly his most sweeping poem.  The work was well received among critics and intelligent readers as it was a brilliant, cultural commentary on that particular moment. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein. Auden has characters (Quant, Malin, Rosetta, and Emble) engaged in a reflective  conversation exploring the contours and particulars of the age within which they were living.  Likely, if this work were cast today, it would likely take place in a Sports Bar with an array of our athletic distractions blaring in the background.