WH Auden’s Visions of England

Edward Mendelson, WH Auden’s literary executor and editor, has called Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island “a Copernican revolution” in studies of the great poet. It’s a big claim, and for the first few dozen pages it looks as though it might be an exaggeration. The book – which combines elements of biography, history and literary criticism, and runs to 750 pages – develops its arguments at a very leisurely pace, and is studded with backward glances and repetitions. Until the reader adjusts to this, it’s hard not to worry that what evidently originated as scholarly devotion might in fact be a form of suffocation.