Soren Kierkegaard and Anglo-American literary culture of the thirties and forties

In the intellectual and literary histories of Britain and the United States the thirties are represented as the period when the mass medias ascended, and when the ideologies and attitudes of communism, international socialism, and the Social Gospel movement attracted mass appeal. In contrast to the group or collectivist theories and perspectives associated with this period, however, many writers also began to take an interest in the translations of Karl Barth's works and to pay attention to such theologians as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Behind both Barth and the growing Neo-Orthodox movement stood Soren Kierkegaard and Christian existentialism. By mid-decade, Kierkegaard's popularity had itself begun to spread to the British and American intelligentsia, and the translation of his works had begun.;Any attempt to understand the sudden importance of Kierkegaard in this period must view his Christian existentialism in a dialectical relationship with mass culture. In addition, although the fifties remade existentialism as a largely atheist philosophy, writers of the thirties and forties, responded to existentialism as a theology. For this reason, when reading the authors of this era one must know their intellectual context and the Kierkegaard they knew.;As trend setters, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden show the importance of Kierkegaard's religion of angst and personal faith to the literature of this period. In Four Quartets Eliot reiterates Kierkegaard's theological interpretation of time and the paradoxes of Christian faith in allusions, paraphrases, and passages from the Kierkegaard available to him in English translations and monographs. Auden reviewed translations and published his own selection of Kierkegaard's writings, and in his four long poems of the war years (New Year Letter, For the Time Being, The Sea and the Mirror, and The Age of Anxiety) used Kierkegaard to formulate his response to the war. The issues which attracted Eliot and Auden to Kierkegaard during this autumnal period of literary modernism subsequently contributed to the rise of postmodernism.