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Auden's Island

A new book finds Auden negotiating and renegotiating his relationship with the island on which he was born.

Emerging from a darkened childhood in an apocalyptic war, he will try to find words to summon for a moment a brighter, better society into being and, just a few years after that, as if the drama were finally over, he will recognize the limits of the beautiful fantasy that a poet can remake the world. (The idea that the North retained some elements of an earlier magical world long after the commercial South had been disenchanted by its own wealth is a common one, and has been central to some great fiction, including Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.) The arc traced in his 1936 collection is long and in so many ways rich, but it bends toward emptiness—as if, after hundreds of years of lyrical rhetoric, Auden’s end point in “Epilogue” is that there was something exhausted and terminal about the myths underwriting English traditions and values.

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