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
