- The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947; first UK edition, 1948) is a long poem in six parts by W. Auden, written mostly in a modern version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. The poem deals, in eclogue form, with man's quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialized world.
- Earl Nightingale. Put two ships in the open sea, without wind or tide, and, at last, they will come together. Throw two planets into space, and they will fall one on the other. Place two enemies in the midst of a crowd, and they will inevitably meet; it is a fatality, a question of time; that is all.
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947; first UK edition, 1948) is a long poem in six parts by W.H. Auden, written mostly in a modern version of Anglo-Saxon-styled alliterative verse. The poem deals, in eclogue form, with man's quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialized world.
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Princeton University Press, Feb 27, 2011 - Literary Criticism - 144 pages. When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety -W. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem-immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. W.H.AUDEN,Selected Poems7A NEW EDITION ':', -'-Edited by EDWARD MENDELSON 0 VINTAGE BOOKS A Division of Random House New York NY-L0. r ' I PS 350( U55 /(17 f; I I 1 19 f Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Auden, Wystan Hugh, 1907-1973. Mendelson, Edward. PS3501.U 821'.9'9.
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News items:
A recording of Auden's last reading, at the Palais Palffy, Vienna, 28 September 1973, has come into the Society's hands andmay be heard on this site.
The Society's Newsletter 40 (December 2020) has beenposted online. Members of the Society who have supplied the webmaster with their e-mail addresses have been sent a message with the password that is required to view or download the file. If you have not received this e-mail message, and you are a current member of the Society, kindly send a message to the webmaster (including your full name) using the address at the foot of this page.
Printed copies will be posted to members who subscribe at the institutional rate. Two online versions of the Newsletter have been posted: one designed foronline reading or to be printed one page to a sheet, the other designed to beprinted on two sides of the page and folded and stapled as a booklet. All recent numbers of the Newsletter may be found on aseparate page.
Auden's Prose, Volumes V and VI, containing his prose writings from 1963 through 1973, have been published by Princeton University Press. Details may be found on the web site of the press:Volume V andVolume VI.
Auden's televised 1971 reading (and updating) of 'The Unknown Citizen' has been posted here, thanks to the generosity of the producer.
An outbreak of forged signatures of Auden seems to have occurred during the past few years, and a number of them have been offered for sale, or have been sold. A few of them arenoted on this site.
A note on dubious quotations from Auden in a book by Jonah Lehrer titled Imagine has been added to an earlier page listing a few things Auden never wrote.
A highly accurate, thoroughly revised version of the Wikipedia.org entry on Auden is now available. This site strongly recommends that online researchers make reference to the archived version of the page, in the link above, rather than to current versions, which may be less accurate or may be subject to vandalism. (A page onWystanus Hugo Auden in the Latin-language Vicipedia may also be of interest.)
Older versions of the Society's web site may be found in theBritish Library's web archive.
See also some further notes that may be of interest.
The W. H. Auden Society commemorates the life and work of one of the greatest poets in the English language.
This web site offers a list of books by Wystan Hugh Auden, links to some of his poems, a selective list of recordings of his readings and of musical settings of his poems, and (to be added in the near future) a biography. Recent news of publications and events of interest to Auden's readers, reports of work in progress, and brief scholarly and interpretive notes may also be found here. Visitors seeking further information can find selective lists of published criticism and biography, links to other web sites, and the archives of the Society's Newsletter. You may search the contents of this site.
Authors and publishers seeking permission to quote the writings of W. H. Auden may consult the copyright page.
A page of frequently asked questions contains information about the poems by Auden quoted in Tuesdays with Morrie (“September 1, 1939”) and in Four Weddings and a Funeral (“Stop all the clocks...”).
Information is available about membership in the W. H. Auden Society and its officers, and a list of contacts is provided for authors and publishers seeking copyright permission to quote, reprint, or translate Auden's works. A map of this site is provided.
You may join the Society on-line using a credit card and a web-based transaction service. Details may be found on the membership page.
Following the ratification of its Constitution in May 2004, the Society is now registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales as Charity No. 1104496. The W. H. Auden Society is registered as a not-for-profit corporation in the State of New York.
Age Of Anxiety Poem
All works by Auden quoted on this site are copyright by the Estate of W. H. Auden and used with the permission of the Estate.
W. H. Auden's Revising Process, a series of eleven articles by Yoshinari S. Yamada, first published in 1974-1990, is now available from this site as a single PDF file.
Auden's Revisions, by W. D. Quesenbery, is a book-length study that the author completed shortly before his death. Through the generosity of his daughter Whitney Quesenbery the entire book is available on this site in PDF format, together with a separate copyright notice.
A warning to potential buyers of Auden memorabilia: Three items in Auden's handwriting were offered for sale on eBay in March 2009; two of them are not exactly what the auction listings describe them as being, and potential bidders should beware. The item described as 'Very rare authentic W. H. Auden handwritten poem' is not a poem at all, but a partial pencil draft of the index of the first lines of the poems that Auden selected for inclusion in an anthology, The Faber Book of Modern American Verse, published in 1956; every line is the first line of one of the poems in the anthology, all written by other poets. The item described as 'Authentic W. H. Auden handwritten Polish Ballet notes' is a printed programme booklet with notes not written by Auden, but someone else who has not been identified; the lot also includes a three-by-five-inch index card with notes that are, however, in Auden's hand; the notes are a brief list of poems by the American poet William Vaughn Moody, evidently listed for possible inclusion in the same Faber Book of Modern American Verse. The item described as 'Authentic W. H. Auden Driver's License' is, however, accurately described, and is evidently Auden's driver's license, apparently issued in December 1968.
News that wasn't: The London newspaper The Independent splashed across its front page on 5 September 2007 the news that three 'lost' schoolboy poems by Auden had been rediscovered. These three unsigned poems were in fact known to researchers for many decades, and there seem to be no convincing reason to believe that Auden wrote any of them. It is of course not impossible that Auden was the author, but they could equally well have been written by almost any literate schoolboy of the period. Katherine Bucknell, the editor of Auden's Juvenilia, has argued in the Society'sNewsletter that one of the poems was written by Auden's friend Robert Medley. Probably no one will ever know who actually wrote these poems, and, as Auden wrote in 'Archaeology,' 'guessing is always / more fun than knowing.'
A note on Reinaldo Javier Sanchez from Venezuela: The Society recently received an e-mail from Reinaldo Javier Sanchez, who describes himself as a professor of English at a university in Venezuela, asking for a copy of Auden's Collected Poems to sent to him by air mail; he writes that he needs it for a project that he has planned for his students. If other webmasters should receive a similar request, they may wish to read some earlier messages written by Prof. Javier Sanchez. Examples of such messages may be found here and here, and further messages from Prof. Javier Sanchez - who evidently teaches a wide range of subjects, is deeply committed to his students, is sometimes male and sometimes female, and has remained 25 years old from at least 2004 through 2009 - may be found through a web search. For some unknown reason, Prof. Javier Sanchez's name does not appear in thedirectory of the university in which he claims to teach.
Webmaster e-mail address: makerofweb(-at-)audensociety(-dot-)org21 February 2021
AG: So Auden –W.H.Auden, the… who, incidentally, it was his anthology that I was reading from originally – the… it’s the first thing in his five-volume anthology of English poetry, poetry of the English language (which we’ve talked about before) also, in the (19)40’s, during World War II, wrote a very great poem called “Age of Anxiety” in old Germanic and Anglo-Saxon alliterative meters. So I thought I would read some of that (and there’s one copy that I got out of the Boulder library which I’ll put in our own (Naropa) library for a couple of weeks, and then I have my own copy here, so if anybody wants to take a look at this at leisure, do so). It’s called “Age of Anxiety”. I think it came out in… wait a minute, let’s see..(19)44 maybe?.. [Editorial note – it was 1947] – It was a big deal. Auden around about that time was a really great poet and is, remains, a great poet. I remember, at the time, I was living with (Jack) Kerouacand with (William) Burroughsnear Columbia University on 115th Street. Burroughs had known..Bill Gilmore, who was a.. stayed with Auden in a house in Brooklyn Heights in (19)39 when Auden first came over from England, and there was a brilliant, eccentric, strange guy namedAlan Ansen, who, at the time.. was a big queer, who lived out in Woodmere, New York, and had huge learned correspondence with Thomas Mann about the prosody in Wagner’s Ring operas (because Wagner was into prosody, as was Auden, as was Stravinsky, as was Chester Kallman, as was Alan Ansen), prosody, like the measurement of word and music together, or the music of the language or the measure of the language, the measure of the line. And Alan Ansen, who was a friend of (Jack) Kerouac’s and mine, and Neal Cassady, was Auden’s secretary when he wrote this huge epic poem. “Age of Anxiety” in alliterative meters. And I was.. So we were all very familiar with it, back in the (19)40’s – mid-‘Forties and late-‘Forties and some early (19)50’s – and I haven’t looked at it since, until today – again – (I) went over to the Boulder Library and picked up a copy (because I remembered it was written in the alliterative meter) and it really is great. So I picked out some passages that I remember from the (19)40’s – to the (19)80’s [present], that almost thirty-five years have stuck in my mind, so I guess they still are good.
The scene is.. It’s during the war, and “Age of Anxiety”, a really prophetic poem. “A Baroque Eclogue” (sic) – (“Baroque”, because he’s using a great many fancy complicated meters). It’s Auden at the height of his energy and power, and also his scholarship, also his crankiness – that he went back.. So, eccentric crankiness. There was a struggle at that time between various schools of poetics. One, to go to a more open form like (William Carlos) Williams, who was just breaking through then and writing his best work, beginning “Paterson” then, an American meter. Auden, who was living in New York on Seventh Avenue and… I guess Seventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street, near the Chelsea Hotel.
Later, I think, Williams sent me to see Auden. The discussion was over prosody and meter between us, open-form prosody, and.. despite the fact that Auden was using older English forms and strict counted meter, he thought, every single line of Auden was different at least, it wasn’t as if they were metronomic and repetitive and boring. There was a real ear at work. So, he gave me a little note to go visit Auden, and I went to see him. Also I’d known Chester Kallman, his boyfriend, and Alan Ansen, his secretary. So Ansen typed up “Age of Anxiety” – and one of the people we’re going to be trying to get here [Naropa} teaching sooner or later is Alan Ansen, because Peter saw him… [to Peter Orlovsky] – You saw him this summer?
PO: Yes, I spent (five days…)
AG: What’s he doing? What’s he doing now?
PO: He’s teaching at the American Center college in Athens. He brings about forty books to class. It meets about two hours, once a week – makes fifty dollars, and he’s teaching (Ezra) Pound, (T.S.) Eliot..
AG: Auden
PO: Auden too
Auden Age Of Anxiety Pdf File
AG: Any language?
PO: Well, I only went to one class, but..
AG: He’s been studying Hebrew and Arabic and Persian and Sanskrit. He knew German well in those days (and) French well enough to do… he did.. his big thesis was a thesis on the prosody, the metrical schemes and the prosody, related to music in theWagner Ring cycle. So, maybe we’ll get him here sooner or later. Anyway, this [“Age of Anxiety”] is what he typed up
It is a situation during the war, late at night, in a bar on Second Avenue, New York City. A young soldier on leave, a navy intelligence man of some sort (maybe gay but in the closet), a Jewish woman, not-so-young anymore, but on the town, looking for someone to sleep with or talk to, and a sort of straight middle-aged man, who is, actually, sort of the hero, at the end of the evening goes home alone and has a long soliloquy which I’ll read
So it’s Malin, Emble, Quant and Rosetta – various people. So they’re all sitting along by the bar, thinking their own thoughts. War news on the radio. They happen to get together and start talking. They have a good time together, get a little drunk, kind of a little paradise between them that night, a “moment in eternity”. They all go to Rosetta’s house to have a drink. She falls in.. she has a crush on the young soldier (so has one of the guys) but she makes out with him (or thinks she’s going to). They all drink to their delightful night. The two other older guys go home and leave them together. She sees them to the door, comes back and finds the young soldier drunk and asleep on her bed, (he) can’t do anything! (She) has a long soliloquy over his.. corpse! (which I’ll read also) – All done in this alliterative meter.
So, Emble was thinking.. (they haven’t met yet – it’s just, what are they thinking about, sitting alone) – Emble was thinking.. “Estranged..” (this is the young soldier) – “Estranged, aloof,/They brood over being till the bars close,/The malcontented who might have been/The creative odd ones the average need/To suggest new goals. Self-judged they sit,/Sad haunters of Perhaps who after years/To grasp and gaze in get no further/Than their first beholding, phantoms who try/Through much drink by magic to restore/The primitive pact with pure feeling,/Their flesh as it flt before sex was /(The archaic calm without cultural sin/Which her Adam is till her Eve does),/Eyeing the door, for ever expecting/Night after night the Nameless One, the/Smiling sea-god who shall safely land/Shy and broad-shouldered on the shore at last,/Enthusiastic, of their convenient/And dangerous dream; while days away in/Prairie places where no person asks/What is suffered in ships, small tradesmen,/Wry relatives in rocking-chairs in/Moss-grown mansions, mothers whose causes/For right and wrong are unreal to them,/ Grieve vaguely over theirs: their vision shrinks/As their dreams darken; with dulling voice/Each calls across a colder water,/Tense, optative, interrogating/Some sighing several who sadly fades.”
“But now the radio, suddenly breaking in with its banal noises upon their separate senses of themselves, by compelling them to pay attention to a common world of great slaughter and much sorrow, began, without their knowledge, to draw these four strangers closer to each other. For in response to its official doctored message:
“Now the news. Night raids on/Five cities. Fires started/Pressure applied by pincer movement/In threatening thrust. Third Division/Enlarges beachhead. Lucky charm/Saves sniper. Sabotage hinted/In steel-mill stoppage. Strong point held/By fanatical Nazis. Canal crossed/By heroic marines.Rochester barber/Fools foe. Finns ignore/Peace feeler. Pope condems/Axis excesses. Underground/Blows up bridge. Thibetan prayer wheels/Revolve for victory. Vital crossroads/Taken by tanks. Trend to the left/Forecast by Congressman. Cruiser sunk/In Valdivian Deep. Doomed sailors/Play poker.Reporter killed.” –
[“Reporter killed” – That’s pretty good, using that old Anglo-Saxon thing for the news broadcast – You can see how it… you know, you can get a funny staccato power.
Auden Age Of Anxiety Pdf
Then Rosetta muses on politics:
“… I think too of/ The conquered condition, countries where/ Arrogant oficers, armed in cars – [Well you get the.. you get the basic alliterative scheme – “Arrogant officers, armed in cars” – so “ah”, “ah” – caesura – then the first accented consonant word begins with the same sound – “Arrogant officers, armed in cars”. And there’s some kind of cross-reference sound – “armed in cars” – “arrogant”, “cars” – “Arrogant officers, armed in cars”. So the sort of “arrogant, cars” rhyme is what is called.. the what? – assonance, I believe. Assonance. Asymmetrical sound. Asymmetrical sound – Assonance. You know the phrase? – It’s like “Him the Almighty Power/ Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky” – [Allen quotes John Milton from the opening of his Paradise Lost here] – Assonance is like the vowelic, vowelic flow, the mirror reflection of the vowels, one to another, or the leading from vowel to vowel, aiou (A-I-O-U), but using it, and then you’ve got the consonants cutting it through – “Arrogant officers, armed in cars”. Anyway.. See, alliteration and assonance here, right? – Assonance – the inward-rhyming of the vowels, or the correlation between the vowels, the hollowness of the vowels, the howl of the vowels (“howl of the vowels – assonance) and Alliteration – the pattern of repetition of the consonants. Yeah, actually assonance and alliteration are the two big wheels of poetic power, because, you know, one deals with the consonants (“constant consonants, clanging curiously”) – and the other is – (“open vowels, howling horrificly”) -You got it? – So one’s the vowels and one’s the consonants. So this is… Of course, you’ve got lots of assonantial vowels in here but you’ve got mainly consonants – pom pom pom-pa-ta – Bom bom bom-pa-di – Cut-cut-cat-wap – Hic-hac-haec-hoc – You got it? Is that clear? – Hic-hac-haec- the oak? – Hic-hac-haec- the oak? -“Arrogant officers, armed in cars,/ Go roaring down roads on the wrong side” – It’s really funny – if it wasn’t so smart]
Age Of Anxiety Auden Pdf
“Arrogant officers, armed in cars Go roaring down roads on the wrong side/Courts martial meet at midnight with drums,/ And pudgy persons pace unsmiling/The quays and stations or cruise the nights/In vans for victims, to investigate/In sound-proof cells the Sense of Honor./While in turkish baths with towels round them/Imperilled plotters plan in outline/Definitions and norms for new lives,/Half-truths for their times. As tense as these,/Four who are famous confer in a schloss/At night on nations. They are not equal:/Three stand thoughtful on a thick carpet/Awaiting the Fourth who wills they shall/Till suddenly entering through a side-door/Quick, quiet, unquestionable as death,/Grief or guilt, he greets them and sits down./Lord of this life. He looks natural,/He smiles well, he smells of the future/Odorless ages, an ordered world/Of planned pleasures and passport control,/Sentry-go, sedatives, soft drinks and/Managed money, a moral planet/Tamed by terror: his telegram sets/Grey masses moving as the mud dries./Many have perished. More will.” – [So he gets really serious, prophetic – 1944. Of course, he was then talking about the image ofRoosevelt–Churchill… Roosevelt, Churchill – Yalta, Roosevelt andStalin,De Gaulle.
[Audio from the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately seventy-two-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximatelyeighty-seven-and-a-half minutes in]
Class concludes with brief outline of future classes, re-iteration of assignments and brief further announcement
AG: (We) got any more time? – No, not very much but maybe..I think, maybe I’ll continue with this, reading next time, read some more of the Auden . Then we’ll go on to (William) Dunbar,(John) Skelton– Skelton, Dunbar, okay, just great sound, but Skelton – Skeltonics. That is to say, Skelton is the guy who wrote a certain kind of short-line poetry that jiggles, that jiggles and rhymes and it is imitatable – Skeltonics. So that’s worth checking out too.
So we’ll have Dunbar, Skelton, and then go on to.whatever ballads you might look through in the Norton Anthology – and I’ll bring in some books of ballads to supplement the ballads we have here. So, okay, our assignments so far – one litttle poem “that falleth as the dew”, like “I Sing of A Mayden” one little poem, one imitation – [turns to Student – You were not here for.. okay..well, when you get the anthology, “I Sing of A Mayden”, what’s the title of that poem?
Student: “I Sing of A Mayden” , page fifty-seven.
AG: Page fifty-seven – “I Sing of A Mayden” – We’ve still got half a minute – Don’t move – Fifty-seven. Well, she wasn’t here when we did it, so why don’t we do that again (because Peter (Orlovsky) didn’t hear that (either)) – Get your fifty-seven out -“I Sing of A Mayden” – Before we go -Page fifty-seven – One more song before we leave – To imitate this poem, m’am, is the assignment [Allen concludes the class by leading a group reading of the poem, the entire poem] – still sounds good – maybe next time, we ought to do a reading of “This Ae Night..” (Lyke Wake Dirge). (Perhaps) we’ll get that going next time. Yeah, look it over again, we’ll do that, and then we’ll get on to the alliterative…and one copy of the Auden will be in the library….