The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue by WH Auden, 108 pages
In The Age of Anxiety Auden produced a worthy successor to Eliot's "The Waste-Land", poetically dressing the cosmopolitan world at the end of the Second World War as Eliot did at the end of the First. Written with traditional Anglo-Saxon alliteration rather than Romantic rhyme, the poem follows four conversationalists who meet in a New York bar and set out to explore the world as it crawls towards senility. Only the tiniest bit of consolation is found for this quartet, but perhaps it is enough for the journey.
The knowledge needed is not special,
The sole essential a sad unrest
Which no life can lack. Long is the way...
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