The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England

This exacting study from Jenkins, an English professor at Stanford University, traces the artistic development of poet W.H. Auden (1907–1973) from his first stabs at poetry in 1922 to his departure from England in 1937. The horrors of WWI loom large in Auden’s poetry, Jenkins contends, suggesting that his description of a mouse hiding from a raptor in “The Owl” is meant to evoke a soldier hunted by an enemy sniper. Jenkins’s analysis tends toward the psychoanalytic, as when he expounds on how a phallic reference to a subject’s “adult pen” reflects Freud’s notion that “the fetish is an everyday object,” and how the romance described in “Before this loved one...” conforms with “the conventional Freudian idea that the homosexual falls narcissistically in love with an image of himself at an earlier stage in his sexual development.” Contrary to Auden’s later reputation as an urbane cosmopolitan, Jenkins argues that the young poet gradually turned from modernist iconoclasm to a conservative, nationalist sensibility steeped in Old English prosody. On more than one occasion, Jenkins devotes several paragraphs to unpacking a single two-word phrase in Auden’s poetry, a level of depth that will strain to carry the interest of general readers. This is best suited for literary scholars. (June)