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Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?

Though Auden maintained that the Great War had little effect on him, its catastrophe haunts his early poetry and shaped his anxiety about what it meant to be English

24 August 2024

9:00 AM

24 August 2024

9:00 AM

The Island: W.H. Auden and the Last of Englishness Nicholas Jenkins

Faber, pp.748, 25

Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems.

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