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

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. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at.

Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and it’s seldom explicitly referenced in the verse. But in Jenkins’s version he’s a war poet. The Great War, Jenkins argues, is

most profoundly a landscape, a history and an atmosphere in the poems that made Auden famous at the end of the 1920s and the start of the 1930s… As in a dream, the story of the war’s violence is there in the bleak, empty northern spaces described in Auden’s early poems, in the roll-calls of the names of obscure hills and villages, in the deserted moors filled, like the recent battlefields, with tunnels, holes and shattered machinery…

With that came a fragile and ambivalent anxiety about what it meant to be English in the interwar world, one Auden explored through landscape, the idea of the island, and an ongoing negotiation with the relationship between the individual and the collective: local affinities, friendship groups, tribes. In this, Auden the 1930s leftie, as we tend to think of him, is a far more conservative figure; and sometimes more than that. He may at one point have called The Orators ‘a stage in my conversion to communism’; at another he called it ‘a catharsis of the author’s personal fascism’.