The Age of Anxiety presents four lonely, displaced characters who congregate in a New York bar on All Souls Eve. External dialogue is interwoven with private thought and dream, and a narrative voice sustains a detatched commentary. The sheer brilliance and variety of much of the verse, the infinitely resourceful imaginative reconstructions of individual memory, dream and longing, and the uncanny verbal ingenuity in matching mood with image entrance the reader moment by moment.