The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England

by Nicholas Jenkins

Overview

A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year

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’s early works, from his first poems in 1922 to the publication of his landmark collection On This Island in the mid-1930s, are prized for their psychological depth. Yet Nicholas Jenkins argues that they are political poems as well, illuminating Auden’s intuitions about a key aspect of modern experience: national identity.

The Island presents a new picture of Auden as he explored a genteel, lyrical nationalism in response to World War I. Amid artists’ and intellectuals’ “rediscovery” of England’s rural landscapes, Auden’s poems reflect on a world in ruins while cultivating visions of a beautiful—if morally compromised—English isle. They also speak to aspects of Auden’s personal search for belonging, including his negotiation of the codes that structured gay life.

As Europe veered toward a second immolation, Auden began to realize that poetic myths centered on English identity held little potential. Reexamining one of the twentieth century’s most moving and controversial poets, The Island is a fresh account of Auden’s early works and a striking parable about the politics of modernism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674303522
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/14/2026
Pages:	768
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.56(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Jenkins teaches English Literature at Stanford University. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Republic, among other publications. He is the literary executor of the ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein.

Editorial Reviews

Marvellous…admirable in its determination to resist simplification of this restlessly English writer.

The Prospect - Jeremy Noel-Tod

What makes [this book] so magnificent, from this historian’s perspective, is the way it locates Auden’s work not only in the life of Auden himself — this much others have done — but also in the life of his nation and his people.

James Chappel

Intelligent, well-researched and well-written.

The Article - Jeffrey Meyers

A superb, deeply researched study of Auden’s early work and identity. Jenkins’s understanding of young Auden as a poet shaped and haunted by the First World War—assimilating the influence of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, and W. H. R. Rivers—is convincing, original, and poignant. Fusing biography, cultural history, and literary criticism in innovative and elegant ways, The Island is a landmark publication in modernist studies.

Heather Clark

The 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

Jenkins has performed a remarkable feat in this new book, making me rethink the early Auden and reread the poems with fresh insight….[he] must know as much about Auden as anyone alive.

Hudson Review - David Mason

This trenchant study of Auden’s relationship to English national identity reanimates the young poet and his early work. Jenkins puts Auden into personal, social, and political context, leading us to new and exciting readings of his life and poems. A revealing and original reexamination of one of the great twentieth-century poets.

Mary V. Dearborn

Nicholas 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

Superb…I can’t think of anyone I’d rather read on the subject.

Sewanee Review - Mary Jo Salter

A robust study of the early works of W. H. Auden…a scholarly yet accessible portrait of an important literary enigma.

Booklist - Brendan Driscoll

An outstanding contribution to our knowledge of both Auden’s intentions and his achievement in the first part of his writing life.

New Statesman - Andrew Motion

Daring in its ideas, written with loving tenderness and implacably true in its revisionism…renews our sense of the numinous.

Times Literary Supplement - Richard Davenport-Hines

Compendious and erudite…[offers] a portrait of the poet that Auden stopped being when he became the poet that he became.

Times Literary Supplement - Samuel Perry

Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life…[he] asks us to see Auden’s ideas and influences as being drawn not from some Platonic realm or intellectual Kwik-E-Mart but growing from the soil of his chance affections and friendships…I hope this is the first book in a sequence.

The Spectator - Sam Leith

Extraordinary.

Hedgehog Review - Alan Jacobs

From the outset, Jenkins urges readers to forget what they think they know of Auden…Instead, the figure [he] looks to portray is even more complicated. He does so by drawing on seemingly incompatible urges and inclinations, a sort of anarchic conservativism. More than political influences, however, Jenkins most keenly draws out Auden’s unerring ability—and desire—to tap into something simultaneously personal and communal: to become, after a fashion, a prophet and a bellwether.

Poetry Foundation - Declan Ryan

A big, wonderfully textured and thought-provoking study…a genuinely fascinating foray into understanding not only the young, forming Auden [but] the forces that did the forming.

Open Letters Review - Steve Donoghue

★ 2024-04-20
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.

Kirkus Reviews