The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

When it was first published in 1947,The Age of Anxiety--W. H. 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. 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 as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers. This volume--the first annotated, critical edition of the poem--introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs´s introduction and thorough 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 still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.