how peaceful 1948 seems now...

(or: Vikings in a low dive)

The Age of Anxiety marks the culmination of Auden’s fascinating, bravura engagement with the poetics of a thousand years before. Though he would continue with the schematic thinking such as underlies so much of this work, his style became more limpid & more overtly didactic after this, & never again would he write anything so formally ambitious or ferociously avant garde. In comparison with The Orators, where a studied obliqueness renders his meaning darkly menacing & at times quasi-psychotic (a word he himself used to describe it), here he follows a doubly- or triply-alliterating line that is almost conversational, weaving instead a complicated pattern of allegory & Jungian notions more reminiscent of Medieval longpoems than anything Modernist. Abundant enjambment gives these verse paragraphs a swift motion despite the essentially static nature of a masque or series of tableaux. Unlike his earlier ventures in this metrical mode, there is relatively little use of strong or adjacent stresses to slow the lines. Rereading this, my earlier (& sole) objection is that it still sounds a lot of the time like iambic or anapestic verse in traditional (albeit loose) meters. Now I can see his care in placing the beats, so that enough of it retains the character of a true Alliterative Meter. He doubtless preferred to make the lines move (as it is ostensibly a poem for dramatic performance) rather than as in his earlier experiments, which are closer to the lurching, clanking effect of a poem like Beowulf. Near the end, he even imitates a dróttkvaett stanza:

"Hushed is the lake of hawks
Bright with our excitement,
And all the sky of skulls
Glows with scarlet roses;
The melter of men and salt
Admires the drinker of iron:
Bold banners of meaning
Blaze o'er the host of days."