The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England
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.
From his first poems in 1922 to the publication of his landmark collection On This Island in the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden wrestled with the meaning of Englishness. His early works are prized for their psychological depth, yet Nicholas Jenkins argues that they are political poems as well, illuminating Auden’s intuitions about a key aspect of modern experience: national identity. Two historical forces, in particular, haunted the poet: the catastrophe of World War I and the subsequent “rediscovery” of England’s rural landscapes by artists and intellectuals.
The Island presents a new picture of Auden, the poet and the man, as he explored a genteel, lyrical form of nationalism during these years. His poems reflect on a world in ruins, while cultivating visions of England as a beautiful―if morally compromised―haven. They also reflect aspects of Auden’s personal search for belonging―from his complex relationship with his father, to his quest for literary mentors, to his negotiation of the codes that structured gay life. Yet as Europe veered toward a second immolation, Auden began to realize that poetic myths centered on English identity held little potential. He left the country in 1936 for what became an almost lifelong expatriation, convinced that his role as the voice of Englishness had become an empty one.
Reexamining one of the twentieth century’s most moving and controversial poets, The Island is a fresh account of his early works and a striking parable about the politics of modernism. Auden’s preoccupations with the vicissitudes of war, the trials of love, and the problems of identity are of their time. Yet they still resonate profoundly today.
About the Author
Nicholas Jenkins writes about and teaches 20th-century culture and literature, especially poetry. After receiving his B.A. from Oxford, Jenkins came to the United States as a Harkness Fellow. He did postgraduate work at Columbia and was then employed as an editor and writer at ARTnews magazine in New York. He received a D.Phil. from Oxford and, after teaching in the Harvard English Department for two years, where he co-directed the "Modernism in its Contexts" seminar at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, he joined the Stanford English Department in 1998. Jenkins is currently completing two projects: a critical edition of W.H. Auden's The Double Man (1941) and a book, under contract to Harvard University Press, called The Island: W.H. Auden and the Making of a Post-National Poetry. Using Auden's work of the 1930s and 1940s as a case study, the volume describes a mid-twentieth-century shift from lyrics of poetic nationalism to a poetics of lyric cosmopolitanism. (An essay on this theme: "Writing without 'Roots': Auden, Eliot and Post-National Poetry" was recently published in the collection "Something We Have That They Don't": British and American Poetic Relations Since 1925.) Jenkins has edited a Lincoln Kirstein Reader and co-edited and contributed to three volumes of Auden Studies. He is Series Editor of the Princeton University Press's "Facing Pages" translation series, and he regularly contributes essays and reviews to periodicals that include the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and theYale Review. A recepient of fellowships from the ACLS and from the Stanford Humanities Center, Nicholas Jenkins is Co-Chair of the W.H. Auden Society and Literary Executor of the poet, scholar and ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein.