The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948 and gave its title to an entire era. Published by Random House in July 1947, it is Auden’s longest single poem — a dramatic work in six parts in which four characters meet in a Third Avenue bar in wartime Manhattan, drink together, journey through an allegorical dream landscape, and wake to their separate loneliness.
The Poem
The four characters — Quant (an aging widower), Malin (a medical officer), Rosetta (a buyer for a department store), and Emble (a young naval recruit) — represent different temperaments and different responses to the spiritual crisis of modernity. Their dialogue takes place partly in the bar, partly in a shared dream vision structured on the Seven Ages of Man and the Seven Stages (a psychological journey).
The poem is written in Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter — a deliberate archaism that gives the language a formal, ritual quality even as it describes subway rides, cocktails, and the banalities of wartime civilian life. This disjunction between archaic form and modern content is itself the poem’s method: the characters reach for meaning through traditional structures that no longer quite hold.
The final section — “The Masque” — is a party at Rosetta’s apartment where alcohol and exhaustion combine to produce a brief illusion of community and love. It dissolves. Malin rides the subway home and delivers the poem’s closing meditation on faith, history, and the human incapacity for lasting connection without grace.
Context and Reception
Auden wrote The Age of Anxiety between 1944 and 1946, largely in New York City. He had emigrated from England in 1939 — a decision that never stopped being controversial in British literary circles — and had returned to Christianity in the early 1940s. The poem reflects both the wartime atmosphere of Manhattan and Auden’s increasingly theological concerns.
Leonard Bernstein composed his Symphony No. 2, subtitled “The Age of Anxiety,” inspired by the poem (premiered 1949). Jerome Robbins choreographed a ballet to Bernstein’s music. The phrase entered common speech far beyond its literary origin — it became the standard shorthand for the postwar era’s combination of material prosperity and existential dread.
Critical reception was mixed at publication. Many reviewers found the alliterative verse mannered, the allegory schematic. Randall Jarrell — Auden’s most perceptive American critic — was ambivalent. Over time, the poem’s reputation has fluctuated: sometimes dismissed as Auden’s most cerebral and least emotionally engaging major work, sometimes praised precisely for its formal daring and its prophetic capture of modern alienation.
Collecting The Age of Anxiety
First edition (Random House, New York, 1947): Green cloth binding with gold lettering. Dust jacket by Edward McKnight Kauffer featuring abstract design in grey, green, and white.
Identification points:
- “FIRST PRINTING” stated on copyright page
- Random House colophon on title page
- Price $3.00 on front flap of dust jacket
- 138 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $400–$800. Signed copies are uncommon (Auden signed books but not prolifically) and command $1,500–$3,000. The Pulitzer association and the phrase’s cultural ubiquity sustain demand.
UK first edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1948): Published one year later. Blue cloth binding. Less valuable than the American first ($200–$400 in jacket) but collected as the British first appearance.
Association copies: Given Auden’s enormous circle of literary friends and lovers, association copies surface periodically at auction. Copies inscribed to Chester Kallman, Stephen Spender, or other significant figures bring substantial premiums.