‘The Age of Anxiety’, W. H. Auden’s book-length poem, has always been described as strange, and difficult. It is an eclogue, but set far from the countryside, in a bar in New York, in the middle of the second world war. It looks like a modern script on the page but metrically it sounds more like Old English. The text flits between conversation and inner thought and is steeped in Jungian philosophy, mysticism and mirrors.
Puritanism has bred the assumption that ‘good people’ do not need free speech
When I first read it in my twenties, I gave up on trying to understand it and simply allowed the words to wash over me. It’s an approach I recommend taking while listening to Robin Brooks’s haunting new dramatisation of the poem on Radio 3. The reading extends to an hour and 40 minutes, which may strike some as a commitment, but is worth every second.
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