Rather than contextualisation of the lives of gay middle-class men in the 1920s and 1930s, Jenkins offers doggedly Freudian readings of Auden’s poems
The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness by Nicholas Jenkins – Opening the lid on a hermetically sealed sex life
Jenkins shows that Auden understood the link between pride-in-place and the postwar power of “national socialism”. Auden was a poet of English towns and the countryside – he only ever lived in London for a few months – and his poems somehow avoid the heritage industry version of the nation, charting the resonant depths of moors and valleys pockmarked by industrial interventions, places he walked as a schoolboy and student.
Despite this, Jenkins is an enthusiastic advocate for a poet whose originality and line-by-line intelligence are still an inspiration: at a time when nationalism and identity politics permeated the arts, he believed “the poet’s sympathies are always with the enemy” and defiantly if inaccurately reimagined England as “This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp, / The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea”.
‘It was an erotic obsession’: Author Robert Harris on a British prime minister’s secret love affair and its disastrous consequences
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