World Civilization- The 19th and 20th Centuries

The Age of Anxiety

The Age of Anxiety , a poem by W .H . Auden expressed the spirit of melancholy that characterized the post-1945 period . This period saw the world reduced into a cataclysm of death and destruction . These were the results of World War II , the memories of the Holocaust massacre in Europe , and the dropping of the two atomic bombs in Japan (Matthew and Platt ,

.583 . The poet therefore saw a period that was caught between a frantic quest for certainty and the recognition of the futility of that search

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This melancholy would evolve into despair as the world entered the cold war era , and the people seemed to brace up for even a larger war , fought with much advanced and lethal weapons such as the nuclear bombs : the people feared a much destructive world war III

It was against this backdrop that various works of art and literature were produced . They , like Auden 's poem , had a touch of melancholy and despair . These artists , musicians , sculptors , philosophers and others tried to portray a world whose people seemed to exist at the edge of perpetual fear . Some of these artists and literary included novelist Tony Morison , Korean American artist Nam June Paik , and African American activist James Baldwin

Tony Morison , was an African-American writer whose works portrayed racial challenges that African Americans went through in the predominantly white society in the U .S . In The Bluest Eye (1970 , the novelist tells...