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The Island: W. H. Auden and the Last of Englishness
A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden's early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England.
W. H. Auden is a towering figure in modern literary history with a complex private self. Hannah Arendt wrote that he had 'the necessary secretiveness of the great poet'. The Island lays bare for the first time some of the most telling 'secrets' of Auden's early poetry, his world, his emotional life, his values and the sources of his art.
In a book that is an argument but also a story, Nicholas Jenkins gives compelling readings of iconic poems. He presents Auden in the inter-War years as both a visionary writer, creatively dependent on dreams and intuitions, and a traumatized poet, haunted by war and suffering, and shadowed by his outsider status as a privileged but queer man.
The Island considers, as well, Auden's imaginative flirtations with a lyrical nationalism appealing to a poet who, for a while, felt his psyche was like a map of English culture. The narrative ends in Auden's disillusionment with these potent myths and beliefs and the time when he left 'the island'.
Auden's preoccupations - with the vicissitudes of war and the problems of love, belonging and identity - are of their time but they still resonate profoundly today.
'A superb, deeply researched study of Auden's early work and identity. Jenkins's understanding of young Auden as a poet shaped and haunted by the First World War - assimilating the influence of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, and W. H. R. Rivers - is convincing, original, and poignant. Fusing biography, cultural history, and literary criticism in innovative and elegant ways, The Island is a landmark publication in modernist studies.'
Heather Clark, author of Red The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
'Nicholas Jenkins is one of our most perceptive and resourceful critics. In this wonderful study of the early Auden, he brings to bear history, biography, and an acute sense of the artistic moment to fashion for us a young genius who is conservative, bucolic, gay, a patriotic adherent of post-imperial Little England. Most people work backwards from a writer's ultimate reputation, but Jenkins gives us a new, unexpected image of a poet developing in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of modernism.'
Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover
'The Island is a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies, a revelatory and often exciting book that presents a new and convincing account of Auden's early years. It explores, for the first time, the deep connections between the inner workings of his poems and the worlds of politics and economics. By bringing to light Auden's ambition to be a national poet, Jenkins transforms our understanding of not only Auden himself but all of modernist literature.'
Edward Mendelson, author of Early Auden and Later Auden
W. H. Auden is a towering figure in modern literary history with a complex private self. Hannah Arendt wrote that he had 'the necessary secretiveness of the great poet'. The Island lays bare for the first time some of the most telling 'secrets' of Auden's early poetry, his world, his emotional life, his values and the sources of his art.
In a book that is an argument but also a story, Nicholas Jenkins gives compelling readings of iconic poems. He presents Auden in the inter-War years as both a visionary writer, creatively dependent on dreams and intuitions, and a traumatized poet, haunted by war and suffering, and shadowed by his outsider status as a privileged but queer man.
The Island considers, as well, Auden's imaginative flirtations with a lyrical nationalism appealing to a poet who, for a while, felt his psyche was like a map of English culture. The narrative ends in Auden's disillusionment with these potent myths and beliefs and the time when he left 'the island'.
Auden's preoccupations - with the vicissitudes of war and the problems of love, belonging and identity - are of their time but they still resonate profoundly today.
'A superb, deeply researched study of Auden's early work and identity. Jenkins's understanding of young Auden as a poet shaped and haunted by the First World War - assimilating the influence of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, and W. H. R. Rivers - is convincing, original, and poignant. Fusing biography, cultural history, and literary criticism in innovative and elegant ways, The Island is a landmark publication in modernist studies.'
Heather Clark, author of Red The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
'Nicholas Jenkins is one of our most perceptive and resourceful critics. In this wonderful study of the early Auden, he brings to bear history, biography, and an acute sense of the artistic moment to fashion for us a young genius who is conservative, bucolic, gay, a patriotic adherent of post-imperial Little England. Most people work backwards from a writer's ultimate reputation, but Jenkins gives us a new, unexpected image of a poet developing in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of modernism.'
Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover
'The Island is a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies, a revelatory and often exciting book that presents a new and convincing account of Auden's early years. It explores, for the first time, the deep connections between the inner workings of his poems and the worlds of politics and economics. By bringing to light Auden's ambition to be a national poet, Jenkins transforms our understanding of not only Auden himself but all of modernist literature.'
Edward Mendelson, author of Early Auden and Later Auden
1084 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 27, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 2, 2025
During my youth & young adulthood, first T. S. Eliot and then W. H. Auden were the cynosures in my poetic sky, simply the best and greatest living poets in the English language, both exponents of Anglican spirituality, & both Anglo-Americans though moved in opposite directions. The elder Auden, the international transatlantic Goethe who wrote for the New Yorker & the NYRB was my senior contemporary. The young poet of the firm Auden, Spender & Isherwood, Poets belonged to the bypassed literary legendary of the Auden Generation, to postwar Berlin & the Spanish Civil War. I learned from this book that the real pre-1938 Auden was a little Englander, a rural nature poet fascinated by mining machinery. I did not read this book with a Kindle - the weighty hardback was a challenge and it took me the best part of a month to get through it. The best parts are the close readings of particular poems which the author sees as crucial to that stage in Auden's development: 'Who stands the crux left of the watershed', "Sir, no man's the enemy, forgiving all' (perhaps Auden's first religious poem), 'It was Easter when I walked in the public gardens' (the great Berlin poem), and especially 'Out on the lawn I lie in bed', inspired by Auden's first mystical experience. Jenkyns makes no attempt to be comprehensive (& the book is very long as it is) but I missed a discussion of some of my personal favourites, especially the 'Address for a Prize Day' & 'Letter to a Wound' - which along with Herod's speech in 'For the Time Being' are my choices for the finest (and funniest) prose poems in the language. 'Letter to a Wound' was a great consolation for me when recovering from serious surgery. This is also a book one reads like a scholar, with bookmarks in both the body of the text and the notes in the back. The biographic information on Auden's relationship with Michael Yates, the 15-year-old schoolboy who inspired 'Lay your sleeping head, my love', according the Richard Crossman the greatest homosexual love poem ever, was immensely illuminating and yet by contemporary #MeToo standards Auden the 20-something schoolmaster surely should be adjudged a predatory paedophile who belonged in gaol. (Auden's own first sexual experience with an adult was at 13 with the school chaplain - horresco referens.) One's tempted to say autres temps, autres moeurs & with cynics such as Evelyn Waugh & Simon Raven regard access to boys as then one of the few perks of an underpaid profession. I did find it revealing how much Auden was influenced by a crackpot psychologist such a Gerald Heard, though like me Auden was a Jungian. But whilst I didn't always agree with the author's insights, especially the psychologizing about the absence of Auden's father in the RAMC during the First World War and the effect of war remembrance on Auden's juvenilia (Jenkyns assumes that when a small animal does something unpleasant to another small animal, it's really an allusion the the Great War), I found this book utterly enthralling.
March 15, 2025
Didn’t really enjoy this book, the author delves into Auden
‘s poems with great gusto and detail, but I’m afraid my intellect in these matters couldn’t really keep up. A bit like songs, you either like a poem or you don’t imo and I didn’t really ‘get’ much of it.
It had enough historical snippets to keep me reading and finish the book, but I sped read most of the second half of it.
‘s poems with great gusto and detail, but I’m afraid my intellect in these matters couldn’t really keep up. A bit like songs, you either like a poem or you don’t imo and I didn’t really ‘get’ much of it.
It had enough historical snippets to keep me reading and finish the book, but I sped read most of the second half of it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews