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The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness Review

Nicholas Jenkins’s exhaustive volume – part biography, part literary study, part marathon – draws together the many influences on the young writer, from the first world war to his fascination with the lead mines of the Pennines

In part, this was because Auden visited the same hills as a schoolboy; even before he famously became transfixed by the abandoned lead mines of the northern Pennines, he had seen – in 1919, when he was 12 – the Blue John Cavern near Castleton in Derbyshire, a place he would later refer to as one of the names on his “numinous map” of sacred spots. But in truth, I was more drawn to earlier parts of the book, in which we burrow down into Auden’s obsession with the escarpments and industrial archaeology of the north – the landscape he would ultimately hymn in the great poem In Praise of Limestone (1948). Most of the places Jenkins describes are those that haunt me, too – and though I’ve long known and understood the subterranean links for the poet between the first world war (trenches), mining (shafts and tunnels) and his father (who served in the Royal Army Medical Corps), such connections are brought definitively alive here.

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