This review is taken from PN Review 280, Volume 51 Number 2, November - December 2024.
Nicholas Jenkins, The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England (Harvard University Press) $35
Areas of Darkness
In October 1939, Hitler gave a speech in the Reichstag and pronounced: ‘There are no more islands today’. Even though the statement is almost parenthetical in Nicholas Jenkins’s magnificent account of Auden’s early years, it might be taken as the expression of a worldview that the young poet did everything in his power to reject.
In isolation, the quote sounds benign, akin to our prevailing sentiment that, for reasons involving technology, commerce and geopolitics, no nation stands alone. In the Führer’s throat, however, it was a repudiation of islands, one in particular – and a warning that they were about to become annexed or annihilated. Through an adroit reading of the Auden canon from 1922 to 1937, Jenkins shows that the early poems were not only prophetic in outlook; they marked an exploration of national identity – of what it meant to be English between the wars.
Auden, Isaiah Berlin remarked in 1935, was ‘fundament-
ally a patriotic poet’. In the same sentence, quoted in The Island, Berlin conceded that Auden wrote ‘most eloquently when vaguely fascist’. He may have been referring to a work such as The Orators (1932), in one section of which the speaker assumes the role of a drillmaster giving a prize-day speech:
In October 1939, Hitler gave a speech in the Reichstag and pronounced: ‘There are no more islands today’. Even though the statement is almost parenthetical in Nicholas Jenkins’s magnificent account of Auden’s early years, it might be taken as the expression of a worldview that the young poet did everything in his power to reject.
In isolation, the quote sounds benign, akin to our prevailing sentiment that, for reasons involving technology, commerce and geopolitics, no nation stands alone. In the Führer’s throat, however, it was a repudiation of islands, one in particular – and a warning that they were about to become annexed or annihilated. Through an adroit reading of the Auden canon from 1922 to 1937, Jenkins shows that the early poems were not only prophetic in outlook; they marked an exploration of national identity – of what it meant to be English between the wars.
Auden, Isaiah Berlin remarked in 1935, was ‘fundament-
ally a patriotic poet’. In the same sentence, quoted in The Island, Berlin conceded that Auden wrote ‘most eloquently when vaguely fascist’. He may have been referring to a work such as The Orators (1932), in one section of which the speaker assumes the role of a drillmaster giving a prize-day speech:
Draw up a list of rotters and slackers, of prescribed persons under headings like this. Committees for municipal or racial improvement – the headmaster. Disbelievers in the occult – the school chaplain. The bogusly cheerful – the games master – the really disgusted – the teacher of modern languages. ...
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