For many W. H. Auden is the indispensable modern poet, and in this
centenary year of his birth, the influential Auden scholar Nicholas
Jenkins asks, how did Auden begin? Jenkins’s young Auden is a
war-shadowed poet of No Man’s Land–like moors and crumbling
houses where, in the 1920s, a struggle for survival rages through
the English psyche. This crisis led the country to a search for a
closed-off, internally reintegrated culture, an “island” life.
Correspondingly, Auden celebrated rural enclaves where a spiritual
regeneration might begin. Jenkins controversially claims that in
this period Auden was no socialist but a poetic Little Englander
who admitted a “tendency to National Socialism.” An Outcast of
the Island is an erudite, imaginative account of how a great
poet’s career opened. It is also a parable about the afterlife of
modernism and a portrait of an entre deux guerres society “where
nobody is well.” Informed by analyses of the influence of figures
such as the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, and by new, revelatory
archival material by and about Auden, his milieux, and his love
life, this book offers highly original, accessible readings of
Auden’s extraordinary poetry. Jenkins’s book ends in 1937 in
Buckingham Palace, where George VI gave Auden a medal. It was a
laying-on of hands as English culture accepted him as the voice of
the insular national spirit. The first phase of Auden’s career
ended at that moment—in a blaze of ignominious success.
General
Imprint: |
Harvard University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
October 2020 |
Authors: |
Nicholas Jenkins
|
Dimensions: |
235 x 156mm (L x W) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
656 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-674-02522-6 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-674-02522-9 |
Barcode: |
9780674025226 |
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