The age of anxiety

The age of anxiety

In the 1930s, a new generation of writers came to the fore. Unlike the first generation of Modernists, these writers were all born at the end of the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th. These writers grew up in a world which had gone through the shock of WWI and developments in science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, etc.

Having to live in a world with no values and tradition was not a painful discovery, as it was for the Modernists, but rather an appalling reality. To Auden and Orwell, for example, the Waste Land of Eliot was not just a creation of the mind but a reality.

The first works came out during the Great Depression of the 1930s, characterised by social unrest and mass unemployment. Like the first Modernists, these writers felt the solitude, but they didn't adopt nihilistic attitudes or experimental techniques, preferring more traditional forms and less obscure language.

The second generation of Modernists believed in the necessity for the artist to not isolate himself from society. The poets took up Socialism as the only possible answer to the problems of society.

The Age of Anxiety came to an end with the traumatic experience of WWII. The poetry of WWII caused less shock than that of WWI because it had been preceded by a long tradition of anti-military, anti-imperialist literature. Poets had already experienced or heard about the horrors of WWI, had lived the Depression and the rise of Fascism in Europe.

Louis MacNeice

• Ireland, later educated in England, Oxford.
• Brilliant use of descriptive detail, images, humour.
• Rejected systematic explanations of life in favour of more personal responses to the world.

Stephen Spender

• A poet and a critic.
• He strongly believed in the social and political function of poetry.
• Worked as a propagandist and defended the poet's rights to deal with political subjects.

Wystan Hugh Auden

• One of the “progressive poets” of the 1930s. These writers held left-wing views and were concerned with social problems.
• Poems - his first important verse collection, edited by T.S. Eliot.
• He went to Spain during the civil war and was shocked by the horrors of the war.
• He went to Iceland with Louis MacNeice; they wrote Letters from Iceland.
• In the 1940s, he adopted a new approach to life: he rejected politics and embraced emotional solitude. He turned to Christianity.
• In America, he became an American citizen.
• He was influenced by the first generation of Modernists, but his intellectual background was different. Like them, he was influenced by Freud's studies and Greek mythology.