Sam Leith Sam Leith

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

Though Auden maintained that the Great War had little effect on him, its catastrophe haunts his early poetry and shaped his anxiety about what it meant to be English

W.H. Auden in 1928. [Bridgeman Images]

  • The Island: W.H. Auden and the Last of Englishness

    Nicholas Jenkins

    Faber, pp. 748, £25

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