W. H. AUDEN. THE AGE OF ANXIETY, A BAROQUE ECLOGUE

Today, The Grandma has been correcting dozens of activities all day and her head is spinning. So, this evening, she has decided to relax her body and soul by reading poetry and has chosen one of her favourite authors, W. H. Auden, the British-American poet, who was born on a day like today in 1907, and who wrote The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, a masterpiece in literature.

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907-29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as Funeral Blues; on political and social themes, such as September 1, 1939 and The Shield of Achilles; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue; and on religious themes, such as For the Time Being and Horae Canonicae.

Auden was born in York and grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional, middle-class family. He attended various English independent (or public) schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. After a few months in Berlin in 1928-29, he spent five years (1930-1935) teaching in British private preparatory schools.

In 1939, he moved to the United States; he became an American citizen in 1946, retaining his British citizenship. Auden taught from 1941 to 1945 in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s.

Auden came to wide public attention in 1930 with his first book, Poems; it was followed in 1932 by The Orators. Three plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood between 1935 and 1938 built his reputation as a left-wing political writer. 

Auden moved to the United States partly to escape this reputation, and his work in the 1940s, including the long poems For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror, focused on religious themes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1947 long poem The Age of Anxiety, the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era. From 1956 to 1961, he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford; his lectures were popular with students and faculty and served as the basis for his 1962 prose collection The Dyer's Hand.

Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. Critical views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive (treating him as a lesser figure than W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot) to strongly affirmative (as in Joseph Brodsky's statement that he had the greatest mind of the twentieth century). After his death, his poems became known to a much wider public through films, broadcasts, and popular media.

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 alliterative verse.

The poem deals, in eclogue form, with man's quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialized world. Set in a wartime bar in New York City, Auden uses four characters -Quant, Malin, Rosetta, and Emble- to explore and develop his themes.

The poem won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948.

A critical edition of the poem, edited by Alan Jacobs, was published by Princeton University Press in 2011.

More information: The Guardian

A poet is, before anything else, a person 
who is passionately in love with language.

W. H. Auden