The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness
Nicholas Jenkins, Faber, £25

THE NEW YORK TIMES obituary of Wystan Hugh Auden in 1976 noted that “he was often called the greatest living poet of the English language.”

In one of his essays he claimed that “the only method of attacking or defending a poet is to quote him. Other kinds of criticism, whether strictly literary, or psychological or social, serve only to sharpen our appreciation or abhorrence by making us intellectually conscious of what was previously but vaguely felt.”

One wonders what the poet might have thought of Nicholas Jenkins’ monumental 748-page study (including 150 pages of reference notes) which is at once a literary, psychological and social study of his poetry from half his life and work.

As the full title suggests, Jenkins also sees Auden’s work up to his emigration to the United States in 1939 as a cypher for the death of an England that, for all its faults, he believed embodied values that were most extravagantly summed up by Shakespeare’s “precious stone set in the silver sea.”

The author sets out to dismiss the conventional picture of the “supposed poet of a Red-decade socialism quickly abandoned, the supposed poet of rumpled, garrulous urbanity, the supposed versifier of bourgeois hyper-cleverness, the ostensible cerebral bard.”

From the outset Auden saw himself as an outsider. Born in 1907 to upper-middle-class parents, his father was a professor of public health and medical officer of Birmingham. Jenkins makes much of Auden playing Caliban in his Gresham’s Public School production of The Tempest: “Every school, every island, every nation has its Calibans, those it categorises as failures, dissidents, disruptors, and outcasts.”

His sense of otherness related to his homosexuality — he never came out as publicly gay — and the dominating impact of the first world war, in which his absent father served, was a formative influence on his poetry.  

Even his early fascination with the English landscape, the mines and tunnels of the industrial north, were “slanted” engagements with the catastrophe of the “great” war. The private world of Auden’s poetry “like the country itself is always full of historic and literary ghosts.”

Before launching out into what is a detailed largely chronological study, involving acute and perceptive literary analyses of Auden’s poems, Jenkins’ intention is “to understand something about the depths of Auden’s artistry. I choose for discussion the poems that open most fully onto the issues — war, trauma, identity, nationality, belonging, love — that are central to Auden’s early writing.”

Jenkins ranges widely in identifying writers whose influence on Auden’s development were significant, Hardy and Edward Thomas at first, along with Yeats, Wilfred Owen and inevitably Eliot’s The Wasteland. 

His early poems “are symbolic accounts of a nation in crisis because of social losses and failures,” while his later poems “characterise the poet as someone who stares into or moves into a darkened world.”

Individual poems are seen as important turning points. At Oxford, Auden, although he later denied it, seemed to be acquiring a broader political consciousness. In the 1926 poem describing the nature of lead mining, he explores the wealth created and accompanying economic exploitation. He also drove a car for the TUC in the General Strike.

Jenkins’ detailed and exhaustive analysis of Auden’s progress, as much psychological as literary, reads like a textured tapestry which at times can appear to recognise more meaning than can be deduced from content, form and intent.

This trait is also apparent in accounts of Auden’s freewheeling gay sexual relationships in his 1928/9 stay in Berlin, “the most immoral city in Europe,” where Jenkins believes, “the English taste for German culture and German sex partners … was symbolically a small act of peacemaking.”

The critical period in Auden’s poetry and his life was that “low dishonest decade,” the 1930s, which saw some of his greatest work and the disillusionment with the world he had belonged to.

Although Auden had referred to his important long 1932 poem in prose and verse, The Orators, as “a stage in my conversion to communism,” the author dismisses the belief in literary circles that he had left-wing sympathies. Indeed, shortly afterwards the poet claimed that it was “a catharsis of the author’s personal fascism.”

By 1935 Auden’s “poetic veneration for the enclave of an English rural world had reached its zenith and was beginning its end.” His poetry was beginning to change into something “simpler and more direct.” Fitfully he began to explore some glimpses of the imperial world.

Auden’s English journey was coming to an end and the poet who had thought of himself as one who “could be the mouthpiece of an epoch” was left in disillusionment.

By 1939, by way of wars witnessed in Spain and China and with intervals of intense poetic production at various cities on the margins of Europe, Auden would be in New York. The later Auden’s poetry would have many other phases and valences but it would never return to the hauntingly insular English poetry that he wrote until the middle of the 1930s.