Awards

• Short-listed for James Tait Black Prize for Biography 2025 (United States)
• Winner of Northern California Book Award for General Nonfiction 2025 (United States)
• Winner of Warren-Brooks Award 2024 (United States)

Overview

A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year A Spectator 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.

Full Product Details

9780674303522

Table of Contents

Reviews

Extraordinary. -- Alan Jacobs * Hedgehog Review * Daring in its ideas, written with loving tenderness and implacably true in its revisionism…renews our sense of the numinous. -- Richard Davenport-Hines * Times Literary Supplement * 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. -- David Mason * Hudson Review * Compendious and erudite…[offers] a portrait of the poet that Auden stopped being when he became the poet that he became. -- Samuel Perry * Times Literary Supplement * 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 * Commonweal * 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. -- Sam Leith * The Spectator * An outstanding contribution to our knowledge of both Auden’s intentions and his achievement in the first part of his writing life. -- Andrew Motion * New Statesman * 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. -- Declan Ryan * Poetry Foundation * Marvellous…admirable in its determination to resist simplification of this restlessly English writer. -- Jeremy Noel-Tod * The Prospect * Intelligent, well-researched and well-written. -- Jeffrey Meyers * The Article * Superb…I can’t think of anyone I’d rather read on the subject. -- Mary Jo Salter * Sewanee Review * A beautiful study of a young poet haunted by war. Exemplary scholarship and profound sensitivity combine in…Jenkins’ nuanced reading of the early work of W.H. Auden…A deeply informed, perceptive literary study. * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) * A robust study of the early works of W. H. Auden…a scholarly yet accessible portrait of an important literary enigma. -- Brendan Driscoll * Booklist * This exacting study from Jenkins, an English professor at Stanford University, traces the artistic development of poet W.H. Auden from his first stabs at poetry in 1922 to his departure from England in 1937. * Publishers Weekly * 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. -- Steve Donoghue * Open Letters Review * 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, author of <i>Early Auden</i> and <i>Later Auden</i> 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, author of <i>Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath</i> 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, author of <i>The Humble Lover</i> 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, author of <i>Ernest Hemingway: A Biography</i>

Author Information

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.

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