Anxiety and Uncertainty in Aesthetic Education

by Martin Schiralli


In choosing a title for what might well be his least successful long poem, W.H. Auden nonetheless succeeded brilliantly in the far more ambitious task of naming an age. Set in his version of the urban Waste Land, a New York bar, The Age of Anxiety probes the dislocations of the modern consciousness as its four principal characters move uneasily toward an understanding of their own—and their time's—condition. If the poem is ultimately about that particular form of anxious dread to be found at the core of S¿ren Kierkegaard or Reinhold Niebuhr, or that most modern form of spiritual angst presented so viscerally in Franz Kafka, the anxiety of the poem's title also quite centrally refers specifically to those psychological and emotional displacements that acutely characterize the feeling lives of large numbers of artists and intellectuals during the broad middle years of the last century.