The Anxiety of Ages: Stevens and Auden

It was not a choice / Between, but of.

—Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

ELEVEN YEARS AGO in the pages of this journal, responding two decades on to the question posed in Marjorie Perloff’s landmark 1982 essay “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?,” Douglas Mao suggested, as an alternative to that ancient critical rivalry, that it might be more useful to consider the postwar poetic moment as the “Age of Auden” instead (175). Upon the friendly invitation of The Wallace Stevens Journal to participate in this special issue, and as the author of a recent book that takes exactly that phrase as its title, I hope it seems more appropriate than self-indulgent in these same pages to take up Mao’s gauntlet and briefly explore what it might actually mean to claim W. H. Auden, rather than Wallace Stevens (or Ezra Pound), as the central figure around whom we frame our understanding of mid-century American poetry. More than that, though, this special Stevens/Auden issue of the Journal offers an ideal occasion to engage in a more general way with the question of how we think about literary history, and to complicate further the apparently proscriptive assertions of my own book’s “Age”-defining title by looking at the role both Auden and Stevens played in the work and careers of younger American poets.

Ever since P. B. Shelley and William Hazlitt labeled the romantic poet “the spirit of the age,” we’ve liked to pose narratives of poetic history in terms of influential, often competing titans—from the assorted Ages of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton all the way up through Hugh Kenner’s Pound Era and Harold Bloom’s declaration of the “Age of Ashbery”—and it’s a convention that a book called The Age of Auden seems clearly to participate in. It’s an admittedly artificial, simplifying device through which the inconvenient sprawl of history can be domesticated by our scholarly rage for order. And there are plenty of other useful ways we might organize our critical accounts of poetry’s past—around scenes or networks, around cultural or technological turning points, around ideas rather than people (who, in these contexts, are almost invariably male). But in terms of the debate at hand, to define the postwar moment as “The Age of Auden” is not, I would argue, to reject or ignore the indisputable Stevensian, or Poundian, legacy in American poetry. It is, rather, to offer a corrective to familiar critical narratives that take the Pound/Stevens binary to be the essential dialectic in the development of postwar poetry. It’s also a renewed engagement with an old debate about the role of émigré artists like Auden in mid-century American culture.

By attending to Auden’s profound and unarguable influence on modern American poetry, we start to see past a nationalist narrative that privileges an asserted, thematic, and notional “American” tradition over the messier and more interesting actualities of how postwar poetry in America developed. (And regarding recurrent critical claims of Auden’s inherent alienness to American culture, it seems relevant that over the course of his life Pound resided in the United States only four or five years longer than Auden, and twelve of those were in St. Elizabeths Hospital.) But it’s worth noting at the outset that the “Age of Auden” is a phrase with an extensive and occasionally fraught history, long before its invocation by Mao (or me). The phrase was already a critical cliché before Auden had even left England in 1939 at the age of 31, reflecting his precocious dominance of the prewar British literary scene. And in Britain today it still functions as journalistic shorthand to conjure up the atmosphere, aesthetics, and politics of the 1930s. The phrase gained a different resonance and meaning after his move to the United States, as Auden established himself at the center of American literary life and readers, reviewers, and critics began to take note of his unmistakable influence on younger American poets. The title of Auden’s own 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning poem, “The Age of Anxiety,” was...