Description
Book SynopsisNicholas Jenkins explores war, love, and politics in the early works of W. H. Auden, one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and moving poets. Auden’s poems embraced both haunted meditations on World War I and lyrical visions of English national identity until, in the mid-1930s, he lost faith in the artistic potential of such myths.
Trade ReviewThe 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 AudenNicholas 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
