Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
For many W. H. Auden is the indispensable modern poet, and in this centenary year of his birth, the influential Auden scholar Nicholas Jenkins asks--How did Auden begin?
Jenkins's young Auden is a war-shadowed poet of No Man's Land-like moors and crumbling houses where in the 1920s a struggle for survival rages through the English psyche. This crisis led the country to a search for a closed-off, internally reintegrated culture, an "island" life. Correspondingly, Auden celebrated rural enclaves where a spiritual regeneration might begin. Jenkins controversially claims that in this period Auden was no socialist but a poetic Little Englander who admitted a "tendency to National Socialism."
"An Outcast of the Island" is an erudite, imaginative account of how a great poet's career opened. It is also a parable about the afterlife of modernism and a portrait of an entre deux guerres society "where nobody is well." Informed by analyses of the influence of figures such as the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, and by new, revelatory archival material by and about Auden, his milieux, and his love life, this book offers highly original, accessible readings of Auden's extraordinary poetry.
Jenkins's book ends in 1937 in Buckingham Palace, where George VI gave Auden a medal. It was a laying-on of hands as English culture accepted him as the voice of the insular national spirit. The first phase of Auden's career ended at that moment--in a blaze of ignominious success.
Synopsis
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 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 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.