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In 1944, in New York City, against a background of a changed and frightening world, the finest – and most controversial – English poet of the day began work on a new long poem. On its publication three years later it would garner some of the worst reviews he ever got and leave many of his devotees cold: while TS Eliot hailed it as 'his best work to date', the Times Literary Supplement deemed it 'his one dull book, his one failure'. It would inspire a symphony and a ballet and win the Pulitzer prize. It was the last long poem he would write.

Auden Age Of Anxiety Poem

'The Age of Anxiety' is the strangest flower of a marvellously fertile period. The decade following WH Auden's emigration to New York in 1939 produced not only the long poems 'For the Time Being', 'New Year Letter' and 'The Sea and the Mirror' – his sublime meditation on The Tempest – but some of the finest works of this or any 20th-century poet: 'In Memory of WB Yeats', 'At the Grave of Henry James', 'If I Could Tell You', 'The Fall of Rome', 'The Quest'. And the great – and latterly disavowed – lament for a falling world 'September 1st, 1939'.

There are still, remarkably, some who believe Auden's gift deserted him when he left England on the eve of the second world war, as if this perceived treachery to the motherland crippled him creatively, but another reason for this position is suggested by the words of Anthony Powell on Auden's death in 1973, as reported by Kingsley Amis, with whom Powell was breakfasting: 'I'm delighted that shit has gone . . . It should have happened years ago . . . scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a . . . like a . . .' But there'll always be an England.

It is in 'September 1st, 1939' that we first glimpse the setting for what would become 'The Age of Anxiety':

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play . . .

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

At the outset of 'The Age of Anxiety' Auden spotlights four of these faces, solitary drinkers in a wartime New York bar: Malin, a Canadian airman; Quant, a world-weary clerk; Rosetta, a buyer for a department-store; and Emble, a young naval recruit. Over six sections – a prologue, a life-story, a dream-quest, a dirge, a masque and an epilogue – they meditate on their lives, their hopes, their losses, and on the human condition. In real terms they get talking at the bar, grab a booth together, get plastered and stagger back to Rosetta's place. There they drink some more and dance a bit until the two older gents drift home and the younger one pledges undying love to Rosetta before crashing out on her bed.

Between these mundane characters and what Auden requires of them stretches a dizzying gulf. Each of his modern Americans speaks, most of the time, in long speeches of alliterative tetrameter, an English form so old as to suggest firelight and the mead-hall. To a mid-20th-century ear, tetrameter would always seem to have a rhyme planned ahead, but alliteration is what English used to bind ideas before it used rhyme, and that's good enough this time for the proudly nordic Auden: 'My deuce, my double, my dear image, / Is it lively there, that land of glass'. The never-fulfilled expectation of rhyme is a suitable curse on any lonesome quartet of drinkers at any bar, a milieu that Auden calls 'an unprejudiced space where nothing particular ever happens'.

Unsurprisingly Malin, Quant, Rosetta and Emble all sound like Auden, who wrote some lively charades but wasn't really a playwright. Then again, because they sound like Auden, what they say is mostly brilliant, beautiful, or both. Here is Malin's description of the death of an airman: 'We fought them off / But paid a price; there was pain for some. / 'Why have They killed me?' wondered our Bert, our / Greenhouse gunner, forgot our answer, / Then was not with us . . .' While Quant imagines the decay of the dead: 'Soil accepts for a serious purpose / The jettisoned blood of jokes and dreams . . .' And Rosetta imagines, with striking prescience, the world to come: 'Odourless ages, an ordered world / Of planned pleasures and passport-control, / Sentry-go sedatives, soft drinks and / Managed money, a moral planet / Tamed by terror . . .'

After several pages of the poem one is aware only of Auden. I defy anyone new to the poem to conceal the characters' names and correctly guess which of the four is talking. Auden's prose introduction to them furnishes us with one man who happens to know his mythology, one man who is 'trying to recapture the old atmosphere of laboratory and lecture-hall', a woman who daydreams of 'those landscapes familiar to all readers of English detective stories' and a young man 'fully conscious of the attraction of his uniform to both sexes'. That is to say, Auden fourfold. When it becomes clear that the puppet-master has handed out abstractions to all his characters – Malin is 'Thought', Quant 'Intuition', Rosetta 'Feeling' and Emble 'Sensation' – one can sympathise with the Horizon reviewer who called the poem 'a re-hash of Auden's psychology divided by four'. John Berryman, who regarded Auden as 'one of the best living poets', none the less called them 'the four vaguest characters in modern literature'.

Auden's burned-out Manhattanites are under no more obligation to chat in American slang than Hamlet is to murmur in Middle Danish. The speeches are meant to be taken as inward monologues, dream-soliloquies, while the uniform shape of utterance suggests a commonality, a shared and inescapable plight. Verse should be neither too free nor too formed, as human experience is also neither: breath and bloodstream hold in place a struggling spirit, and Auden is a master of human utterance only insofar as he's a master of form.

But for all its local wonders, its unceasing appeal to grace and intelligence – plus some welcome bursts of satiric laughter – there is something formally wrong with 'The Age of Anxiety'. If one is going to create puppets then one has to make them move, and they don't. They don't really move each other, let alone us. They begin in thought – 'Quant was thinking', 'Malin thought', 'Emble was thinking' – and move into conversation – 'Malin suggested' 'Quant approved', 'So did Rosetta' – but in their actual speeches they show only the faintest traces of attention to one another. In the third section, 'The Seven Stages', Auden has them leaving the bar behind, not literally, but, by dint of being drunk, fanning out into a dream-landscape on a spiritual quest (is any drink that good?) at which point one wonders why he set it in a bar at all.

The quest requires that at one point the four ascend 'the same steep pass', the only physical effect of which is to shorten their speeches, but paradoxically this causes them to sound more than ever like projections of abstractions: Rosetta (Feeling) has 'a horror of dwarfs / And a streaming cold', Malin (Thought) muses that 'The less I feel / The more I mind', while Emble (Sensation) complains 'I hate my knees / But like my legs'. One voice hardly ever responds to what another has said, as if the four abstractions were true oppositions, or sealed off from each other like the four elements. Those may be, but voices aren't.

The fifth section, 'The Masque', set in Rosetta's apartment, with Malin ogling Emble and Emble pawing Rosetta, would seem to require the most interaction, but the four remain symbolic mouthpieces, and when Emble and Rosetta dance and finally kiss, they render the following sweet nothings:

Emble said:

Till death divide

May the Four Faces Feeling can make

Assent to our sighs.

She said:

The snap of the Three

Grim Spinning Sisters' Spectacle Case

Uphold our honors.

And so to bed. It's easy to chuckle at this, but it's merely the sound of a form stretched to its furthest premise and, well . . . snapping. And yet there are traces of beautifully resonant writing, evoking the moment, bringing human faces close to our own, throughout 'The Age of Anxiety' – they're just all in prose. They're the stage-directions.

Malin is watching Emble and Rosetta flirting. He 'had been building a little altar of sandwiches. Now he placed an olive upon it and invoked the Queen of love'. A little while before, when the group arrives at Rosetta's place, they 'all felt that it was time something exciting happened and decided to do their best to see that it did. Had they been perfectly honest with themselves, they would have had to admit that they were tired and wanted to go home alone to bed.' Quant 'waved his cigar in time to the music' and 'invoked the local spirits'. Rosetta, having seen the older men to the elevator, finds Emble comatose on her bed: 'She looked down at him, half-sadly, half-relieved . . .'

One must love Auden's poetry to be able to speak this heresy, but I can't help wondering what fun he might have had – we might have had – with, instead of the poem, a wartime novel in the vein of Henry Green or Elizabeth Bowen. In virtually the last words of the poem something is revealed: '[Malin] returned to duty, reclaimed by the actual world where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no interest . . .' This points to the problem with 'The Age of Anxiety': time is real to real people. Abstractions can't change, so they don't listen.

A lesser poet wrote a greater poem for the age of anxiety: in Louis MacNeice's 'Autumn Journal', set in London on the brink of the war, a recognisably human voice is blown hither and thither by memories, lusts and terrifying headlines. Auden's 'The Age of Anxiety' isn't even the best work of art called 'The Age of Anxiety': if I'm a junior minister in Auden's world, I'm barely a tea-boy in that of Leonard Bernstein, but I'd accord that honour to his Symphony No 2. Bernstein found the poem 'fascinating and hair-raising'. From the time he read 'The Age of Anxiety' in 1948 'the composition of a symphony based on [it] acquired an almost compulsive quality', he wrote, describing an 'extreme personal identification of myself with the poem, the essential line [of which] is the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith.' Three years after the Holocaust, in the year of the founding of Israel, one can scarcely imagine how 'difficult and problematic' faith had become for Bernstein.

Like the poem, the symphony is divided into six movements, each movement itself sub-divided, but many of the movements fade or blur into each other. By his own admission, Bernstein followed the poem very closely, with the piano representing the self in quest of meaning and faith, struggling to be understood, to be loved, against a backdrop of jazzily detached and distracted woodwinds, horns, celesta and wild percussion. For the quest section, the piano descends a tentative, untrustworthy scale, like the onset of dream, while 'The Masque' – the bit in Rosetta's apartment – is a scintillating piano solo, a real dance for dear life. Bernstein's daughter Jaime called it 'ridiculously difficult . . . one of the hardest parts ever written', and it does magnificently what the poem can't do – spins the characters out beyond reason in their desire to blot out the dismal world.

Throughout the piece instruments explode into life, peter out suddenly or are drowned out by others, yet the same fragile theme struggles on. This gives the symphony the concision and cohesion wanting in the poem. It is short (for a symphony) and electrifying. Its voices hear each other. And if the grand closing chords seem more resolved than anything at the end of the poem – notwithstanding Malin's Christian optimism as his train crosses the Manhattan bridge at sunrise – perhaps, at that point where genius in language and music meet, only the latter can seem to mend what's broken.

Glyn Maxwell leads a discussion on 'The Age of Anxiety' at Southbank Centre on 18 April. Marin Alsop conducts Bernstein's symphony at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (0844 875 0073) on 21 April. www.southbankcentre.co.uk