Amor Loci: Auden in Rookhope

Abstract

I present a conspectus of the imaginative geography of the English poet WH Auden. This imaginative geography is avowedly the product of a rootless, cosmopolitan which extols domestic virtues against the backcloth of an originary poetic homeland in Rookhope in the Northern Pennines of England. Auden’s poetry addresses eternal questions about the conditions under which communities thrive or decline, what dividends they bestow upon their members, the costs and benefits of choosing to cultivate local knowledge and attachments and how communities coexist at different scales. Auden’s topopoetics reflects his search for affective bonds in a life marked otherwise by placelessness. It is a quest for a sense of place in the absence of insideness – in this respect it affects more widespread concerns of how to belong to place in an age of hyper-globalisation. Although the landscape of the Northern Pennines held a profound aesthetic attraction for Auden, it was the numinous experience of his youth in Rookhope that allowed him to attach his poetic and personal biography to the place and ascribe its meaning. This amounted to a kind of elective belonging, albeit stripped of any sociological connotation or political commitment.