In 1933, the English poet W.H. Auden told his friend Stephen Spender, “I entirely agree with you about my tendency to National Socialism, and its dangers.” It’s a surprising confession. He ...

Yet the poem doesn’t have the obdurate syntactical strangeness of early Auden, and to pass from its penultimate to its last stanza is to move from an almost Juvenalian mercilessness into another realm ...

Jenkins cleverly suggests that the notably Germanic quality of Auden’s early poems—with their interest in Old English poetry and their glimpses of modern Berlin—expressed a cultural desire to make ...

As early as 1920, the year that Auden left his prep school (St Edmund’s, in Hindhead, Surrey where Christopher Isherwood was his contemporary) and went to Gresham’s in Norfolk, he was beginning to ...

Auden was twenty-one. These two handsome volumes of Auden’s collected poems bring nearly to an end the sumptuous edition of the poet’s Complete Works , begun thirty-five years ago and edited entirely ...

For Nicholas Jenkins, WH Auden’s piercingly brilliant early poems emerge in the devastated wake of the first World War. Although it is absent as a named subject, war is presented as the crucial ...

Why Auden thought poets must always ‘side with the enemy’ Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island offers a reassessment of WH Auden’s early life – but fails to give any insight into his ...