Books: Eclogue, 1947

THE AGE OF ANXIETY (138 pp.)—W. H. Auden—Random House ($2.50).

Though U.S. readers may still think of Poet Wystan Hugh Auden as an Englishman in exile, he has been a U.S. citizen since May 1946. As a U.S. man of letters, Auden at 40—Old Oxonian, old leftist intellectual, Wandervogel, versifier extraordinary, theological lyricist—is a figure of great oddity, and of considerable importance. The Age of Anxiety, subtitled "A Baroque Eclogue," glitters with evidence of both.

In the eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil, shepherds met in bucolic settings and conversed in polished verses. In Auden's eclogue, three men and a woman fall into a...