POETRY: JOHN MONTAGUEreviews The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue By WH Auden Edited by Alan Jacobs Princeton University Press, 200pp. £15.95

ON THE COVER of this new edition of The Age of Anxiety(first published in 1946), a slender WH Auden, trousers bunched to the knees, feet bare, cigarette in hand, stands on a strand as the surf rolls in or out. It is the Atlantic, presumably, but in which direction is he so pensively looking? Is he on one of Fire Island's gay beaches? Or is his only female lover (and model for one of the characters in this book) just out of sight? Perhaps he is gazing towards his lost England: " O Patria, patria! Quanto mi costi!" This anguished cry from Verdi's Aida ("O my country, my country! What you cost me!") prefaces part three of The Age of Anxiety. Indeed, Auden's decision to stay in the US after the outbreak of the second World War had provoked a lot of angry criticism from a Blitz-beleaguered Britain.

Technically, The Age of Anxietyis fascinating, a long poem in the poet's beloved Anglo-Saxon metre. Auden pays tribute to Tolkien's lectures in Oxford: ". . . he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish." He also admired longer medieval poems, such as The Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knightand, above all, William Langland's Piers Plowman. But what startles us about The Age of Anxietyis not only that it is a contemporary poem written in ancient cadences but also that it celebrates New York, that most brash and modern of cities. In fact, it takes place in a bar on Third Avenue, in the shadow of the elevated subway. One could even go so far as to describe it as a kind of poetic anticipation of Cheers.

It begins promisingly, as we meet the four characters. Quant (as in quantum) is interrogating himself, Hamlet-like, in the bar mirror, as many of us have done: “My deuce, my double, my dear image . . .” Quant is the intuitive type, whereas Malin is the clever one, his name a rare use of French for Auden. Emble (short for emblem), meanwhile, is handsome, young and uncertain:

To be young means

To be all on edge, to be held waiting in

A packed lounge for a Personal Call

From Long Distance, for the low voice that

Defines one’s future.

How those lines wrung my withers when I was young myself!

And then there is Rosetta, Auden's anima, a middle-aged though still attractive woman of English background. Her reveries allow him to indulge in what he calls topophilia, a term actually coined by John Betjeman, to whom The Age of Anxietyis dedicated, and meaning "love of place". So Auden gives Rosetta his first landscape, "That lay to the north, from limestone heights / Incisive rains had dissected well, / For down each dale industrious there ran / a paternoster of ponds and mills" which naturally shelter the churches of the religion to which, distressed by contemporary evil, he had recently returned: "St Bee-le-bone, St Botolph-the-less, / High gothic growths in a grecian space . . ."

This homage to the poet’s only lady love is even more touching because Rhoda Jaffe, the inspiration for Rosetta, was Jewish. In fact, Auden’s sombre evocations of her historical form of anxiety are particularly moving:

On Babylon’s banks. You’ll build here, be

Satisfied soon, while I sit waiting

On my light luggage to leave if called

For some new exile . . .

And "Though lights burn late at police stations, / Though passports expire and ports are watched . . . I'll be dumb before / The barracks burn and boisterous Pharaoh / Grow ashamed and shy. Shema' Yisra'el: / 'adonai 'elohenu, 'adonai 'echad."

If Rosetta is the most interesting of the four characters, perhaps it is because not only does Auden imbue her with his own ancestral landscape; he also melds it with her Levantine one.

So the four-stress, alliterative measure of Langland is deployed by four lonelies, but a soliloquy or monologue is obviously static. And all the cast can manage is to move from the bar to a booth, and then to an improvised party, where Emble passes out after making a pass at Rosetta. Even compared with Eugene O’Neill or Thomas Kilroy, this is overdoing the classical unities. But perhaps Auden was simply not a real dramatist. (As a young man, I called on him in New York, and he asked: “Where are you off to this evening?” When I replied that I was going to a Tennessee Williams play, he sniffed: “Who could be interested in such people?”)

But what holds this book together is Auden's rich mind. Despite his disdain for Yeats's magic, he himself was an intellectual magpie. An early influence was Freud, for whom he wrote a fine elegy, and then Jung, especially his Psychological Types(1921), which clearly inspired his creation of the four characters. (His editor, Alan Jacobs, describes him as "an inveterate maker of charts and diagrams".)

A surprising influence is that of another night-time book: it seems Auden read Campbell and Robinson's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wakeas he was beginning The Age of Anxiety.

The Age of Anxietyhas none of the marvellous lyrics of The Sea and the Mirror("My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely . . .") or the plangency of New Year Letter. But the introduction and notes are commendably professional and helpful, as is this whole enterprise by the Princeton University Press of bringing Auden into scholarly focus, especially his New York period when he was very much the professor.

But does The Age of Anxietystill describe our society's state? Or are we experiencing a different kind of collective emotion? The walls of airports sweat unease as we pass, coatless, beltless and shoeless, through security portals, those ultramodern thresholds, while, in the lounge, 24-hour news channels inform us of the latest atrocity or natural disaster.

In a world where suicide bombers infiltrate barracks and marketplaces, crazed gunmen spray schools and churches, and the more “sophisticated” countries show how you can destroy your enemies with pilotless planes, are we merely anxious, or must we accept that we are living in “The Age of Terror”?

John Montague is a poet. His new collection, Speech Lessons, will appear this month from the Gallery Press