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 nationalism appealing to a poet who, for a while, felt his psyche was like a map of English culture. 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.
