Auden said: ‘The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow poets.’ Certainly Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, which was first published in 1947, is seldom understood except by other poets. As with Proust’s seven-volume novel, far more readers begin this six-part poem than finish it. It is, concedes Alan Jacobs, the editor of a smart new edition, ‘extraordinarily famous for a book so little read; or, extraordinarily little read for a book so famous.’
One obstacle is the misleading title. Anxiety is only obliquely Auden’s subject: by 1947 he had renounced politically propagandising poetry, and did not give the commentary on Cold War tensions that readers anticipated. The poem comprises a dialogue between four strangers who start talking in a New York bar during the final months of the second world war. Malin, a medical officer in the Canadian air force, personifies Intellect; Rosetta, a department-store buyer, personifies Feeling; Quant, a downtrodden shipping clerk, personifies Intuition; and Emble, a horny young sailor, personifies Sensation. They talk in the bar, they vanish into individual dream worlds, return to reality when the barman chucks them out, continue talking in a taxi-ride to Rosetta’s apartment, where they sing, and some dance and kiss. The descriptions of their chance meeting conjure the private emptiness and public anti-climax experienced by war victors when their enemies are vanquished.
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