THE ISLAND

A beautiful study of a young poet haunted by war.

Exemplary scholarship and profound sensitivity combine in Stanford English professor Jenkins’ nuanced reading of the early work of W.H. Auden (1907-1973), beginning with the first poem the 15-year-old wrote in March 1922 and ending in 1937, when Auden left England to live abroad. As Jenkins portrays him, Auden in the 1920s and ’30s, was “a raw, intense, wounded, politically ambiguous, prophetic figure” fascinated “with Englishness and the meaning of England.” Two forces shaped his poems: the catastrophes of World War I and the collective sensibility of English society’s “gradual, dazed, selective rediscovery and reenchantment of the rural landscape.” Although not aiming to craft a comprehensive biography, Jenkins provides such detailed information about Auden’s life during this period, along with historical, cultural, and political context, that the result is a fascinating biographical study, as well as an authoritative close reading of selected poems “that open most fully onto the issues—war, trauma, identity, nationality, belonging, love—that are central to Auden’s early writing.” Jenkins examines Auden’s evolving literary influences, including Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and the Sitwells. By 1926, Auden was writing “Sitwellian” poetry but soon emerged from what Jenkins deems a short-lived “self-consciously modernist phase.” Early travels in Germany confirmed Auden’s sense of Englishness, but by 1935, his marriage of convenience to Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, and his affinity for German poets such as Rilke and Friedrich Hölderlin, led him to widen his perspective away from England. In the early poems, though, as Jenkins amply shows, Auden was acutely sensitive to the fragility and sensibility of a wounded nation: “The First World War appears like a light, always on, that is discernible as a glow even through the fabric of a closed curtain.”

A deeply informed, perceptive literary study.