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 inter-War 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, politics and economics, his emotional life, his values and the sources of his art. Chapters cover music, war and sex 1907-1922, the English and Germany 1928-29 and Fear and Love 1932-1935, with index, Auden's titles and first lines and useful chronology from his birth in February 1907 in York to his last Christmas in England for 35 years in December 1937. The young Auden as a poet was shaped and haunted by the First World War and assimilated the influence of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Robert Graves. Fusing biography, cultural history and literary criticism in an elegant way, this is a landmark publication of modernist literature. 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 traumatised poet, haunted by war and suffering, and shadowed by his outsider status as a privileged but gay man. 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. 748 pages in a monumental volume, illustrated.