W. H. Auden has long been a name to conjure with. The English-born poet, who spent much of his life in exile, had a long and restless career. Most famous, perhaps, is the left-wing Auden: the one who drove an ambulance in Spain and wrote the immortal “Spain 1937.” Others prefer the cerebral critic of modernity, whose classical learning alerted him to the ways that human flourishing was being impeded by modern forms of bureaucracy and control. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) uses Auden in this way to provide epigraphs to her chapters on power and domination in the digital age. My own favorite Auden is the one who wrote a good deal for Commonweal: the austere, meditative Christian one finds in his ravishing Christmas oratorio or his Horae Canonicae, a sequence that brings the life of Christ into liturgical dialogue with our own lives.

As the critic Nicholas Jenkins shows us, however, there is yet another Auden—and one who may speak more persuasively to readers today than any of those others. This is the young Auden and, what comes to the same thing, the English Auden (he left England, more or less for good, at the age of thirty-two). Jenkins’s new book, The Island, emerges
from a thought experiment. What if Auden had died on the cusp of exile? If, say, his first airplane flight, to Denmark in 1935, had crashed into the sea? Auden would still be remembered. He was, after all, an astonishingly prolific poet, already well known in Europe and America. But he would not be known as a poet of anxious urbanity, and certainly not as a Christian, or even as a leftist. Instead, he would be defined, as many young people are, by the land of his parents and ancestors. The young Auden was, first and foremost, an Englishman, haunted by England’s tortured landscape and its war-battered population.

The Island is a study of this early Auden, the most ambitious one undertaken so far. It is clearly a labor of love, and feels in some ways anachronistic. This is a time hostile to poetry and generally unreceptive to six-hundred-page tomes on the first third of a poet’s career. Nonetheless, The Island is as demanding and rewarding as Auden’s poetry itself. What makes it 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. Auden’s self-portrait as a lonely exile was accurate, but only for part of his life. In his youth, he was firmly identified with Shakespeare’s “scepter’d isle”: England.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in 1907, to a middle-class Birmingham family. While the impact of his mother’s religiosity on the later Auden is obvious, Jenkins is keen to emphasize the role of his father, a physician and intellectual. Like many at the time, George Auden was infatuated with all things Northern and Nordic. The idea, more commonly associated with figures like J.R.R. Tolkien (Auden’s tutor at Oxford), was that the truest England was not the Latinized, Christian culture brought by the Romans and the Normans. The truest England was Anglo-Saxon, oriented more toward Iceland and Germany than Rome: an England of ancient peoples, myths, and languages. This idea was surprisingly popular in Britain at the time. It was associated with anti-imperial and anti-industrial politics, as in the hugely popular works of William Morris.

Auden was, of course, too young to fight in the First World War, which broke out when he was seven. But he was shaped by the war all the same. It is difficult for Americans to understand the trauma that war unleashed on British society: millions dead, and millions more scarred, physically and emotionally, by industrialized carnage that touched most everyone in Britain. Auden’s father was deployed for years as a physician. The absence was hard on the family, especially as he took a mistress (a nurse in Egypt). Auden later claimed that his homosexuality stemmed from his father’s absence in these formative years. Whether that’s right or wrong—and whether he meant it seriously or not—it does show how central the war was to the impressionable boy.

One of Jenkins’s theses is that the young Auden should be understood as a war poet. In making that claim, he is not trying to dump Auden into familiar narratives of cultural history. Perhaps no theme is so well trodden as the impact of World War I on English poetry. Just two months before The Island appeared, Michael Korda published an epic study of the World War I poets (Muse of Fire). That book focuses on the famous war poets who had actually fought in the war and who tried to bring the mud and bone of the trenches into the prim garden of English verse. Sometimes, their work did so by bringing new themes into established forms. Others felt that the devastation required new poetic forms. A generation of poets, including T. S. Eliot, tried to show readers an exhausted, broken Europe through fragmented and polyglot poetry. This approach took most famous form in The Waste Land (1922), the modern epic that portrayed England as an abandoned land, haunted by ghosts and in need of spiritual renewal.

Auden was not a war poet in this sense: he is unmentioned in Korda’s book and was for the time being unmoved by the modernist experiments birthed by war. He did not even read The Waste Land until 1926, by which point he’d already written a good deal of poetry. In any case, Eliot’s impact on him was, as Jenkins shows, short-lived: for a few months at Oxford, Auden tried on the guise of the brooding modernist poet. It didn’t take. For as Jenkins reminds us, the era of high modernism in British poetry was rather brief. Poets were abandoning the cosmopolitan ennui of early postwar poetry and returning to more traditional forms. It wasn’t that the war was forgotten—in Britain, it could not be. It was that the tone of war memorialization changed.

Auden’s early poetry, written when he was still a student, is obsessed with the English countryside where he spent much of his time. (He was not, like Eliot, a fixture of London life, and lived there for only a few months.) Jenkins provides bravura readings of these poems, showing that even Auden’s juvenilia rewards close attention. Auden was mainly reading poets like Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, who taught him that the fate of the nation could be unveiled through complex meditations on the countryside. And in his case, that countryside was in the north. He never had much interest in the bucolic home counties of the south that Tolkien would immortalize as “The Shire.” He was interested, instead, in the more spartan landscapes of the North, and especially in the mining industry (he first hoped to be an engineer, and mining imagery recurs in his poetry throughout his life). At the age of nineteen, for instance, he wrote a haunting poem called “Lead’s the Best,” inspired by the defeat of the miners in the General Strike of 1926.

In the later 1920s, Auden found his footing as a poet (his first collection was published in 1930). The poetry of this period, Jenkins argues, was animated by an attempt to grapple with and heal the wounds of the war. He continued to write poetry about the English countryside, much of which emphasized the alienation that modern visitors feel in the face of a land that had so freely nourished their ancestors. He also wrote his first play, Paid on Both Sides, a cryptic and violent verse drama depicting an ancient blood feud that could not be quelled.

The play was clearly a cipher for the war, portraying the English and the Germans as estranged members of the same clan. It was clearly, too, an attempt to update the kind of Old English, Anglo-Saxon poetry he had studied in school. At Oxford, he had not excelled as a student, but he had at least participated in the continuing English vogue for all things Northern and all things German. This was a departure, and a provocative one, from the scene of just a few years earlier. After all, the Germans had only recently been England’s great enemy, and the apostles of high modernism, especially Eliot, had looked to the French. But by this moment in English cultural history, the French had become passé.

After Auden graduated, with an academic record so dismal it left him in tears, his parents offered him a year abroad. Auden chose Berlin, then as now an exciting capital of culture, with a reputation as more libertine and less stuffy than Paris. He had a remarkable year, frequenting the city’s gay subculture and nursing a friend after a suicide attempt. But in many ways the trip was not a success. His German was imperfect and he made few lasting ties with Germans. He had flings rather than love affairs. He returned to England, where he would remain for most of the next decade. (His friend Christopher Isherwood stayed in Berlin for several more years, which resulted in the famous Berlin Stories and, eventually, the musical Cabaret.)

Auden’s time abroad, Jenkins argues, reconfirmed his vocation as a national poet. The most important poem of that period, and the one at the literal center of his 1930 poetry collection, dramatizes that failure, and that return to “home”: the “place / where no tax is levied for being there.” Upon his return, he embarked on a new life as a private tutor, schoolmaster, and burgeoning public intellectual (commenting mainly on educational themes, not directly political ones).

For the next seven years, Auden lived a peripatetic life in England and Scotland, writing the poetry that would be collected in the volume he called, of course, On This Island. The poetry was just as obsessed with England and its land as Auden’s juvenilia had been. But it was haunted less by the violence of the past than by the violence Auden could sense in the future. His first major product was a feverish project called The Orators (1932). A collection of poetry and surrealist nonfiction, it tells the story of a nameless “airman” who attempted to lead a rebellion against an authoritarian English regime before dying in a suicide attack. The politics are opaque, and the Auden of this period could not really be called a leftist. He nursed a romantic critique of capitalism that was just as common on the Right. Auden’s friend Isaiah Berlin, one of the era’s keenest judges of character, thought that Auden was “fundamentally a patriotic poet” who wrote best when “vaguely fascist.” The Orators was meant to be a critique of fascism, which was on the march in Germany as it was being written (Auden had witnessed street violence during his Berlin sojourn). To many readers, though, it seemed to be rather enamored of the doomed military leader. Auden himself wrote later that the book was “a catharsis of the author’s personal fascism,” and that his “name on the title-page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented but near the border of sanity, who might well, in a year or two, become a Nazi.” In a 1933 letter to a friend, he agreed that he had a “tendency to National Socialism”—one that he of course rejected, while also rejecting the pull to socialist internationalism. “For myself,” he concluded, “I know my temperament and necessity, force me to work in a small field.”

Auden was adrift in the early 1930s, as his beloved England was rocked by the Great Depression. He found himself, I imagine, sharing the plight of many readers of a magazine like this one: an instinct for justice, a veneration of tradition and high culture, and a profound unease about how those two sensibilities could be brought together, if indeed they could. Here he is, writing to a friend after taking a job at a Quaker school in the South of England: “I’m just going off to a Quaker school at Colwall, to teach culture to those who can afford it. It’s difficult to know what we ought to do. It’s wicked to try and keep the ship going; it’s conceited to join the ‘We’re doomed’ gang, and cowardly to jump into the sea.”

This tension could not, perhaps, be resolved politically, but it could at least be expressed poetically. I’d urge readers to seek out the 1932 poem “Out on the lawn I lie in bed.” It’s a profound meditation on love and peace in a time of hate and war. It begins with an evocation of an English country idyll: a small group of intimates, enjoying love and work together. At the poem’s midpoint, the narrator begins to reflect on his purposeful ignorance of foreign or imperial affairs—he wants to enjoy his garden without pondering “what doubtful act allows / Our freedom in this English house.” The poem transitions to a vision of the hungry masses gathered outside the gate, ready to destroy a culture that has lost its vitality: “For what by nature and by training / We loved, has little strength remaining.” The poem ends in a crescendo of hope that, in the reckoning to come, those bits of the past that the speaker loved might survive: “As through a child’s rash happy cries / The drowned voices of his parents rise / In unlamenting song.”

In the tumultuous years of the mid-1930s, Auden tried to do what the narrator of “Out on the Lawn” could not: deepen his engagement with international affairs, and even with the crimes of the British Empire. (He was involved in the production of a documentary about the slave trade.) He tried to become a committed internationalist, as his adventure in Spain indicates. But in the end he became something a bit different: an exile. In 1939, he left England, basically never to return. Of course, many internationalists, including Marx and Lenin, had been exiles. Their experience, though, was not Auden’s: he embraced exile by choice. Why did he do it—if he was as committed to England as Jenkins thinks?

Auden’s exile, Jenkins argues, was not that of the revolutionary or the world-weary. It was that of the artist, who believes that the culture of the homeland positively requires fertilization from foreign sources if it is to live. The clearest model for this was Thomas Mann, who left Nazi Germany in order to save what was best of his beloved nation. (Mann was, in fact, Auden’s father-in-law—Auden had married his daughter to help her secure a visa.)

Auden sometimes saw himself as a prophet, but he wasn’t. He was a poet, defined by Jenkins as “a voice brilliantly transmitting the contours of life in a specific time and place to whoever wants to listen to this signal from a world that is both distant and somehow still close.” To read Auden, Jenkins argues, is to come close to the heart of our century. Few others were so attuned to new currents in life, finding expression in new words. His poems, according to Jenkins, were the first to use two words that would help define the twentieth century: “sexy” and “television.”

Jenkins’s book brings this Auden to life and gives us the tools to tune into Auden’s signal. The book is a reminder of what the humanities can be, and what supporters of humanistic inquiry are fighting for. It is long—perhaps too long—and sports a now-uncommon level of erudition (“Auden was the most bird-sensitive English poet since John Milton”; “A yo-yo craze in England peaked in 1932”). Jenkins gives himself a pleasant degree of liberty, too, analyzing Auden’s dreams as though he were Auden’s psychoanalyst.

But why should we tune into Auden’s signal? We have our own drowning national experiment to think about, after all. But perhaps that is precisely the point, and the reason why Auden can speak to us now. When we tune into Auden’s signal, we find a dilemma that defines, for many of us, our age as much as his.

The central tension for Auden concerned the importance of place and home. He always felt the draw and the allure of home: of the closed circle, the small town, the face-to-face community unspoiled by globalization. Many poets and politicians of his age, as of ours, felt the same allure. They responded in different ways. T. S. Eliot, long Auden’s friend and publisher, romanticized those virtues of place so much that he ended up as xenophobic and antisemitic. This was too much for Auden (as he told Eliot). Others, like Auden’s more internationalist friends, sought to deny that element of themselves altogether, finding a home in global solidarity and the revolutionary brotherhood to come. This, too, was insufficient for Auden—even when he did go to Spain, he didn’t much like what he found there.

Perhaps this is why, at the decade’s end, Auden famously referred to the 1930s as a “low, dishonest decade”: he saw the ways that all of his friends and fellow poets were denying aspects of themselves in order to mount a coherent aesthetic and political position. W. H. Auden was many things—and there were even times when he was “low”—but he was never dishonest. His poetry is a record of his honest reckonings with the ideological currents of the age, when refracted through the emotional and corporeal needs of the individual. He felt the call of home, and of the island. But perhaps because of his queerness, he understood the exclusions and the violence that were necessary to buttress the comforts of home and hearth.

Auden reviewed a literary biography of George Bernard Shaw for this very publication in 1946. In a ghostly way, which he would have appreciated, his opening remarks about Shaw can close our own remarks about him, and about Jenkins’s fine book. “If biographies of writers are justifiable,” Auden began, “it is because, in their case, the ways in which they accept and revolt against their immediate situation are peculiarly easy to watch.” This was certainly true of Auden himself, as he doubtless knew and as Jenkins has shown.

But Jenkins has shown us something else, too. “A writer is great,” Auden continued, “in the degree to which he transcends both simple acceptance and simple revolt, so that later generations are conscious in reading him less of his relevance to his age and more of his relevance to themselves.” Perhaps he was secretly thinking of himself here, because few writers have been so repulsed by simple acceptance and simple revolt. To read him is to understand not just the island of England, but the island of the modern self: that self that feels the tug of both home and flight, and whose heart sometimes produces ideas that shame the head. To some readers, this makes Auden an unnecessarily cerebral and slippery writer. But to others, this is just what makes him great.