The Island

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.