The Caliban of Old Blighty 

In The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England (Harvard University Press, 2024), the scholar Nicholas Jenkins poses an intriguing question, followed by an equally intriguing answer: “What kind of writer would Auden seem like now if he had stopped writing in 1936? He would sound like a voice from a modernizing but still pastorally fixated England, like an oddly conservative figure.” This contention is at the heart of Jenkins’s book, which foregrounds the young, distinctly English W.H. Auden. The poet’s first verses were indebted to the darkly inflected countryside portraits of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, at least until Auden moved overseas permanently in 1939, first as an exile and ultimately as a US citizen. Jenkins’s voice is authoritative and considered, evincing his decades-long immersion in Auden’s work. The Island presents the poet as an at-times conflicted, ambivalent figure whom a contemporary review (not inaccurately) described as the head of a poetic group of “communists with an intense love of England.”

Jenkins’s Auden begins as Caliban—literally. Auden played the role in a school production at Gresham’s School, “a small, relatively progressive but firmly upper-middle-class, fee-paying” institution in which he felt himself—not for the last time—to be something of an outlier. He was troubled by the strictures of Gresham’s “honour system” and refused to exhibit the requisite “mystical reverence” for its cosseting atmosphere. Jenkins suggests that Auden’s earliest poems reflect this Caliban aspect, indicating a sensibility already operating on the margins with a certain Dionysian energy. For Jenkins, these early poems

look like they are acts of negation—negations of a polite social order and of advanced literary fashions. But as negations, they herald the emergence from darkness of a new kind of modern English poet making his way into the light, of a new dispensation in modern literary history, and of a profound shift, or retrenchment, in national cultural values . . .

Even at this early stage, Auden was tuned into the idea that the marginal, the outcast, is central to shaping a culture and to realigning or revivifying that culture when it’s become stultified. From the outset, Jenkins urges readers to forget what they think they know of Auden, “the supposed poet of a Red-decade socialism quickly abandoned, the supposed poet of rumpled, garrulous urbanity, the supposed versifier of bourgeois hyper-cleverness, the ostensibly cerebral bard.” Instead, the figure Jenkins looks to portray is even more complicated. He does so by drawing on seemingly incompatible urges and inclinations, a sort of anarchic conservativism. More than political influences, however, Jenkins most keenly draws out Auden’s unerring ability—and desire—to tap into something simultaneously personal and communal: to become, after a fashion, a prophet and a bellwether.

Auden had the “necessary secretiveness of the great poet,” to quote Hannah Arendt. It’s clear that his traumas, anxieties, and childhood scars—as well as his dream-life and even, once or twice, his visionary one—fed into his work, admittedly in artfully disguised ways. In addition to necessary secretiveness, Auden had something of the secret agent about him, working coded allusions, linguistic games, and other ludic messages into poems that ostensibly refuse to speak of private things while doing precisely that, if one only knows where to look. In one of his countless forensically (almost obsessively) close readings, Jenkins notes how the bl sounds in “Before this loved one” may hint at the place of its composition, Berlin, as well as the name of Christopher Isherwood’s then-beloved: Berthold.

Secretive, small-scale verbal designs like these are almost never included in the catalogue of Auden’s strengths as a poet, but they appear in some of his most significant poems, like a spy’s important message hidden in an apparently innocuous letter of greeting.

Auden was a “something has just happened” poet, but his being drawn to a prevailing mood, or moment, is richer and less reactive than mere journalistic chronicling. One of the great strengths of Jenkins’s reading of these early poems, many of which amount to juvenilia, is his assertion that “the young Auden is a war poet—a First World War poet.” The Great War entirely colored the atmosphere, language, and psychic landscape in which Auden grew up and later took his first steps as a writer. And Auden was beset by a personal feeling of the war’s severance and disjunction thanks to the fact of his father having served, leaving the family home when Auden was seven and not returning for five years. Auden’s deep-rooted awareness of “a lost authority figure within his psyche gave [his] poetic mind a deeply representative cast; it is a part of what made his poetry resonate in postwar England,” Jenkins writes.

In the years after the First World War, Jenkins reminds us, England was a country in “which war and death were everyday preoccupations and in which their traces were everywhere in actual, and psychic, landscapes.” One of the offshoots of Auden’s temporary loss of his father was a tendency toward creating fantastic, or at least internalized, worlds. These centered largely around lead mines and the machinery associated with that then-crucial industry. Jenkins persuasively links mines and the theatre of war: “[Auden’s] interest in mines evolved while he was living in a country caught up in a desperately costly and unfamiliar kind of conflict, a war in which the earth was a source of both life and death.” He adds, “The trenches themselves were only a step away from being mines. There a filthy, dangerous life was eked out in dank excavations and gloomy tunnels.” Jenkins also finds parallels between the underground activity of miners—full of danger, grime, and intense labor—and the more idealized, pastoral landscape above the pits: “because mining was not an antithesis to nature but a complement to it—as if miners were like heroic, subterranean farmers harvesting the earth’s riches beneath the surface instead of above it.”

This link, like the analogy between mines and battlefield trenches, was a crucial aspect of Auden’s early, death-scarred work. These poems draw out the psychological ruptures in the English psyche through seemingly pastoral verse, or at least poems that take as their subject an attempt to survey—often from on high—the fields and contours of Norfolk or the Pennines. Auden’s first poems are full of birds, the natural environment, and certain national mythologies, but rarely people. For Jenkins, they’re the work of a repressed but clearly traumatized young man, and he astutely picks up on Auden’s habit of concentrating on the small-scale, a pervasive littleness in the poet’s gaze. “A focus on the minute can be a traumatic marker, the sign of an extremely distressed psyche,” Jenkins writes. This is well said; one thinks of Joseph Cornell’s boxed-up treasures. Auden, attuned to the “national ghost,” combed the landscape for fine, hidden details: a mouse’s “pair of round brown eyes,” for example. The darker notes point also to the fact that, where once the English countryside might have offered lyric escapism in its more romantic figurations, now, due to the slaughter of the French and Belgian fields, “The pastoral English world is no longer the peaceful antithesis to the battlefield but its double.”

Some of the book’s most interesting writing considers Auden moving through his discovery of T.S. Eliot’s Modernist mode and constructing a difficult, allusive, but flawed new voice, only serving in the end as a route toward what became his more “constrained and nationally specific” style. Reading Eliot’s Waste Land belatedly, in 1926, Auden encountered a poet who had already moved on, stylistically and conceptually, from cosmopolitan referentiality toward his own version of a more rooted poetry. According to Isherwood, Auden always held certain “forebodings of catastrophe in England” for as long as he’d been a writer, and having briefly embraced some of the lessons from Eliot’s early work, Auden came to the harrumphing conclusion that “All this continentalism won’t do . . . It simply doesn’t suit us. And we do it so frightfully badly.”

Instead of “continentalism,” Auden began to use “English” as a term of praise in the latter half of the 1920s. He looked to other influences, such as W. H. R. Rivers, the doctor who had treated Siegfried Sassoon for shellshock, whose writing Auden came to know through his father. Rivers became an earlier and, in Jenkins’s view, more important influence on Auden’s thinking than Freud; or at least Auden learned Freud’s ideas through the writing of people like Rivers, who absorbed and articulated them for an English readership. The chief residue of Auden’s fleeting experiment with the Eliotic mode was an enhanced sense of anxiety in his poetic voice, another reason for his work managing to feel at once highly idiosyncratic but also connecting with a deep seam of its readers’ mood. “Auden’s greatness as a writer is inseparable from his vulnerability,” Jenkins writes, “and his exploration of postwar national identity exposes a side of his persona that was fragile, chaotic, and representative.”

When Auden goes back to a more pastoral, less Modernist voice, he does so to work through ideas of isolation, privilege, and the uncanny. There’s a deepening to his thought about England and its future—and its past, its landscape, its people and mythology. A key new ingredient in his ability to write poems that channel some of these energies and traditions came about while he was studying at Oxford between 1925 and 1928. Auden “was first captivated by Old English poetry when he heard [J. R. R.] Tolkien reciting Beowulf in his ‘Beowulf and The Fight at Finnesburg’ lectures,” Jenkins writes, and from this period began to weave into his own work some of the acoustic clatter, the alliterative sonics and muscularity, of the Old English poems he was coming to love. This was mirrored by a more foregrounded interest in violence, with his “charade” Paid on Both Sides (1928) being a noteworthy example of Auden tapping into a popular obsession—in this case, American gangsters and a boom in films, books, and slang in which violence and murder were the lingua franca. Auden was coming to see an immutable link between an individual’s psychology and the national one. “Freud’s error is the limitation of the neurosis to the individual. The neurosis involves all society,” he wrote.

In the late 1920s Auden moved to Berlin, a city that offered a great deal of sexual opportunity and was a maelstrom of the avant-garde in art, theatre, and much else. Jenkins notes that Auden had long associated Germany with “forbidden pleasures.” Through his father, he had developed a profound and lifelong interest in the myths and language of “the North,” via Nordic sagas, as well as a keen eye on Germanic myths, music, and culture, no doubt bolstered by his new love of Anglo-Saxon language. He was in step with the fashions of his generation: interwar Germany had become what France had been to Eliot’s generation in offering a kind of bohemian alternative to home, the enticements of the new and subversive. Auden’s poems began to include words such as anxiety, but this wasn’t only an enervating time; rather, it was the beginning of a pattern in which “siding with life against death, Germany against England, foreigners from a different class against compatriots from his own social milieu” would become key to Auden’s work and thinking. It also marked the first of many schisms in his life and art, with the troubled national past, an idea of renewal and rebirth, newly countering those haunted landscapes that had been an overt feature of his thinking about place and his position in it. Instead, he begins to write of “all of those whose death / Is necessary condition of the season’s setting forth.”

While his Berlin adventures helped reset his thinking, Auden wasn’t yet ready to commit himself to living permanently away from the UK. He returned to England in 1929, where he worked as a schoolteacher, getting into a besotted relationship with one of his then-13-year-old pupils. If that wasn’t troubling enough (in an attempt to diffuse the shock, Jenkins notes that such affairs were relatively common at the school, and that Auden himself had sex with an adult school chaplain at age 13), Auden entered a period of a somewhat unwitting flirtation with ideas that would come to look dangerously tantamount to fascism. His work from this period is one in which an “enthusiastic presentation of the idea that a strongman, both terrifying and necessary, has arrived to solve the problems of the democratic state has an unsettling undercurrent,” per Jenkins. Auden later referred semi-seriously to a certain degree of “National Socialism” creeping into his views at this time, even if unconsciously, in what he’d believed to be critiques of the fascist outlook. “I entirely agree with you about my tendency to National Socialism, and its dangers,” he wrote to Stephen Spender in 1933. “It is difficult to be otherwise when one’s surroundings, and emotional symbols are of necessity national emblems.” What lay behind this was a newfound urge to become a “mouthpiece,” a communal and potentially healing figure who would piece together, through poetic language, a remedy for cultural inertia and malaise. Auden sought to remake and unify a society heading toward another, even more ruinous, disaster.

This is the outset of a “messianic fantasy” that Jenkins diagnoses in Auden’s work of the late 1920s through 1936—a desire to write poems with redemptive power, built out of and embedded in compressed English “groups.” These little communities or units of connection were small in scale but exemplary: potentially a version of the sort of now-diminished faith that once bound society together. “We shall do absolutely nothing without some sort of faith either religious like Catholicism or political like Communism,” Auden wrote, seeing himself at the vanguard of a fight against dissolution and a resetting of culture itself, toward a more oral, localized approach. “If literature is to survive, most of us will have to stop learning to read and write, stop moving from place to place, and let literature start again by oral tradition,” he argued. He saw an “ecstatic transformation” in England’s fortunes at that moment, but later came to see this as a delusion, or at least a great overreaching. His own beliefs, such as they are, appear as much in flux as society’s, lurching between grandiose, salvationary hopes and a desire for seclusion, a wish to throw his lot in with “romantic love in sheltered corners of the rural world.” There is also a sense of him fighting his own instincts, the search for some grand political answer running counter to his own sensibility in this apparently sought-after brave new world of strongmen or faithful new communal orthodoxies: “what is lost is most of what one has loved as an individual . . . What one loves is often evil. How difficult it will be to change.”

What changed for Auden, through the 1930s, was a dawning sense of connection to the European mainland, to a sense that the “island” of England isn’t so cut off as all that, but instead that narrowed perspectives and isolationism are, ultimately, a dead end, poetically as well as politically. Instead of the urge toward being a healing, national figure of unity, the more pressing artistic responsibility became, during this “low dishonest decade,” as he called it, one of warning people of a growing storm ineluctably gathering, “extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice.” His work also seems prescient about the global near-future. “August for the people,” from the mid-1930s, talks of a “dangerous flood” being on its way. Not unconnected, Auden swapped teaching for documentary-making, finding himself more directly engaged in public discussions, education, and communication. He started—subliminally at first—to write poems in which it’s clear that undisturbed Island life is a time-limited fantasy, and he agreed to marry Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter, in order to allow her escape from Hitler’s Germany. Auden’s connections and loyalties were now being drawn away from the parochial, or encircled, and looking overseas, to that other nation of exiles, of the displaced intelligentsia and those falling afoul of the rise of the strongmen he had briefly seemed to welcome. A big breakthrough would come, as Jenkins puts it:

The implication for Auden and his readers is that by 1936 the authentic English poem is no longer necessarily one written within England’s borders or one secured in its representativeness by references to English (or American) culture.

Jenkins points out, too, that Auden felt he needed to leave England for his artistic growth, having fallen into another version of an “honour system,” very different to the one at Gresham’s, in which he was in danger of becoming a national treasure, rather than a railing outsider, commenting from the margins.

Auden left the island precisely to continue being a Caliban within English culture, a figure whose actions provoked, and provoke, outrage, bafflement, fascination, censoriousness, admiration, dismissal, and even calls for retribution.

Auden had moved through several modes. He began as a poet of suggestive, war-shadowed landscapes and came to find, through a use of older modes of English writing such as Old English alliteration and insights from new psychoanalytic and philosophical investigations of individual and national traumas, that while his temperament drew him to the “small field” of the compressed English “cell,” his future would have to take place away from the culture in which he’d come of age. He had become the prophetic, public-facing figure he thought a poet should be and already written work with a depth of resonance for a traumatized, shellshocked populace reeling from one brutal catastrophe and on the brink of another. He would maintain his role as provocateur, seer, and outcast by voting with his feet and siding with the tide of culture over the pull of little England. Jenkins’ insight from the late 1920s that “using lyric symbols, this young poet has taught himself to sense the presence of the country’s ghosts” would remain true, even as his palette widened and he wasn’t himself a resident of that haunted, no longer inviolate, Island.