Island (eBook)

Nicholas Jenkins (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
464 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-38634-5 (ISBN)

Infos

A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden's early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England. W. H. Auden is a towering figure in modern literary history with a complex private self. Hannah Arendt wrote that he had 'the necessary secretiveness of the great poet'. The Island lays bare for the first time some of the most telling 'secrets' of Auden's early poetry, his world, his emotional life, his values and the sources of his art. In a book that is an argument but also a story, Nicholas Jenkins gives compelling readings of iconic poems. He presents Auden in the inter-War years as both a visionary writer, creatively dependent on dreams and intuitions, and a traumatized poet, haunted by war and suffering, and shadowed by his outsider status as a privileged but queer man. The Island considers, as well, Auden's imaginative flirtations with a lyrical nationalism appealing to a poet who, for a while, felt his psyche was like a map of English culture. The narrative ends in Auden's disillusionment with these potent myths and beliefs and the time when he left 'the island'. Auden's preoccupations - with the vicissitudes of war and the problems of love, belonging and identity - are of their time but they still resonate profoundly today. 'A superb, deeply researched study of Auden's early work and identity. Jenkins's understanding of young Auden as a poet shaped and haunted by the First World War - assimilating the influence of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, and W. H. R. Rivers - is convincing, original, and poignant. Fusing biography, cultural history, and literary criticism in innovative and elegant ways, The Island is a landmark publication in modernist studies.' Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath 'Nicholas Jenkins is one of our most perceptive and resourceful critics. In this wonderful study of the early Auden, he brings to bear history, biography, and an acute sense of the artistic moment to fashion for us a young genius who is conservative, bucolic, gay, a patriotic adherent of post-imperial Little England. Most people work backwards from a writer's ultimate reputation, but Jenkins gives us a new, unexpected image of a poet developing in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of modernism.' Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover 'The Island is a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies, a revelatory and often exciting book that presents a new and convincing account of Auden's early years. It explores, for the first time, the deep connections between the inner workings of his poems and the worlds of politics and economics. By bringing to light Auden's ambition to be a national poet, Jenkins transforms our understanding of not only Auden himself but all of modernist literature.' Edward Mendelson, author of Early Auden and Later Auden

Nicholas Jenkins teaches English Literature at Stanford University. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Republic, among other publications. He is the literary executor of the ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein.

Textauszug

CHRONOLOGY

 

feb 1907

born in York, the third son of George and Constance Auden

ca summer 1908

Auden family moves to Solihull, near Birmingham

april 1912

first memory of a public event: the sinking of the Titanic

sept 1914

Dr. Auden joins the Royal Army Medical Corps

summer–autumn 1915

Dr. Auden serves at Suvla Bay during the Gallipoli campaign

oct 1915

with brother John starts boarding at St. Edmund’s School in Surrey

jan 1916

Dr. Auden is invalided out of frontline medical duties

aug–sept 1917

Dr. Auden on leave; dispute with Mrs. Auden about a mistress in Egypt

sept 1917–feb 1919

Dr. Auden serving as a military medical administrator in Britain and France

ca winter 1917

shamed for his appetite in front of the school: “I see, Auden, you want the Huns to win”

ca feb 1919

Dr. Auden is demobilized and returns home

summer 1919

Auden family moves to Harborne, a Birmingham suburb; Dr. Auden suffers an attack of encephalitis lethargica

ca aug 1919

visits the North Pennines for the first time

ca march / april 1920

sex with the school chaplain at St. Edmund’s

oct 1920

starts at Gresham’s School in Norfolk

july 1921

plays Ursula in the Gresham’s production of Much Ado About Nothing

march 1922

as Auden walks with Robert Medley in a ploughed field, Medley inspires him to start writing poetry

july 1922

plays Katharina, the “shrew,” in the Gresham’s production of The Taming of the Shrew

aug 1922

walking tour in the Lake District with his brother John and Dr. Auden

ca 1924 /1925

the Audens buy Wesco in the village of Threlkeld in the Lake District

july 1925

plays Caliban in the Gresham’s production of The Tempest

ca july 1925

writes “The Dying House”

aug 1925

first journey abroad: with Dr. Auden to Salzburg and Kitzbühel

oct 1925

goes up to Christ Church, Oxford, intending to read natural science

march–april 1926

writes “‘Lead’s the Best’”

may 1926

drives a car for the Trades Union Congress in London during the General Strike; reads The Waste Land and adopts a modernist poetic style

sept 1926

switches to reading for an undergraduate degree in English literature

dec 1926–jan 1927

visits Austria again

june 1927

submits a book of poems to T. S. Eliot: rejected in September with mild encouragement

june / july 1927

drops his Eliotic modernist style and writes “I chose this lean country”

july–aug 1927

spends a tortured holiday with his father in Yugoslavia; perhaps writes his first poem abroad

aug 1927

writes “Who stands, the crux left of the watershed”

oct 1927

meeting with Eliot in London

dec 1927

starts drafting Paid on Both Sides

jan 1928

writes “Control of the Passes was, he saw, the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.8.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• ISBN-10: 0-571-38634-2 / 0571386342
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-38634-5 / 9780571386345