Description
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 n
