” Quant is the intuitive type, whereas Malin is the clever one, his name a rare use of French for Auden. Quant (as in quantum) is interrogating himself, Hamlet-like, in the bar mirror, as many of us have done: “My deuce, my double, my dear image. It begins promisingly, as we meet the four characters.
One could even go so far as to describe it as a kind of poetic anticipation of Cheers. In fact, it takes place in a bar on Third Avenue, in the shadow of the elevated subway. But what startles us about The Age of Anxietyis not only that it is a contemporary poem written in ancient cadences but also that it celebrates New York, that most brash and modern of cities. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish.” He also admired longer medieval poems, such as The Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knightand, above all, William Langland’s Piers Plowman. he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. Auden pays tribute to Tolkien’s lectures in Oxford: “. Technically, The Age of Anxietyis fascinating, a long poem in the poet’s beloved Anglo-Saxon metre. Indeed, Auden’s decision to stay in the US after the outbreak of the second World War had provoked a lot of angry criticism from a Blitz-beleaguered Britain. It is the Atlantic, presumably, but in which direction is he so pensively looking? Is he on one of Fire Island’s gay beaches? Or is his only female lover (and model for one of the characters in this book) just out of sight? Perhaps he is gazing towards his lost England: “ O Patria, patria! Quanto mi costi!” This anguished cry from Verdi’s Aida (“O my country, my country! What you cost me!”) prefaces part three of The Age of Anxiety. ON THE COVER of this new edition of The Age of Anxiety(first published in 1946), a slender WH Auden, trousers bunched to the knees, feet bare, cigarette in hand, stands on a strand as the surf rolls in or out. POETRY: JOHN MONTAGUEreviews The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue By WH Auden Edited by Alan Jacobs Princeton University Press, 200pp.
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