Auden.

The poetry of Wystan Hugh Auden impresses itself on the mind before it does so on the ear. Weighty ideas about history and human nature, bearing down on the words, seem to have worn off the usual verbal varnish: syntax can seem unwieldy, or imagery oddly juxtaposed, or rhymes too easy, as though they were meant sarcastically (take for example the lines from his sonnet sequence "In Time of War:" And strangers were as brothers to his clocks,/And with his spires he made a human sky;/Museums stored his learning like a box,/And paper watched his money like a spy.") Subjects seem unrooted, drifting among vague mysterious energies. Lines draw their power from the ideas beneath them.

Replying in the late `60s to criticism that a poem of his was prosaic, Auden wrote: "In so much `serious' poetry I find an element of `theatre,' of exaggerated gesture and fuss....I want [the reader's] reaction to be: `That's true,' or better still, `That's true: now, why didn't I think of it for myself?' To secure this effect I am prepared to sacrifice a great many poetic pleasures and excitements."

Thrifty with clarity as well as poetic excitements, Auden's poems can seem at least abstract, if not, as Anthony Hecht once put it, "Orphic and obscure." But to Auden they were true, and when his ideas of truth changed, he sometimes revised early poems, heedless of protests from devotees.

By concentrating on the ideas Auden moved between and through, rather than on minute biographical details, Richard Davenport-Hines gives his book a hint of Audenesque mystery. As he acknowledges in an afterword, he has not tried to write a definitive biography: Humphrey Carpenter's 1981 W. H. Auden left Davenport-Hines "free to write a biography that is more thematic, or selectively emphatic."

His choice has been to do an interpretive reading of Auden,s life and work, dwelling on the ideas that preoccupied the poet at various times: his stoicism about suffering and his conviction that the glory of human love lay in its imperfections, his interest in Freudianism, his cynicism about civilization, his fleeting visions of utopias, and his re-discovery of Christianity when he was in his thirties. Davenport-Hines weaves this intellectual chronicle into the account of the poet's life, quoting amply from Auden's prose as well as from his poetry.

The portrait he draws is of a brilliant intellectual with a gift for philosophizing, a keen sensitivity to history, and a commitment to his craft that made him exasperatingly self-centered. Throughout his life Auden demonstrated a contrarian and even curmudgeonly streak that led him to state, in the 1950s, that "Alienation from the collective is always a duty." Born in York, England, in 1907, he discovered his homosexuality at a young age and began to rebel against the inhibited mood of the times at just about the same time as he was dazzling his contemporaries at Oxford.

When his father volunteered to finance a year in Europe, Auden chose Berlin because the risque delights of Paris were already a cliche. He did try to be useful in Spain during the Civil War ("As I have no dependents, I feel I ought to go;" he wrote, "but O I do hope there are not too many Surrealists there") but he soon regretted his poem "Spain" with its militant refrain "But today the struggle." In 1938, after a trip to China with Christopher Isherwood, he renounced overt political activity, a move that alienated many idealistic contemporaries. From henceforth he was to believe that art could not change the world; as he put it in his elegy "In Memory of W. B. Yeats": "poetry makes nothing happen."

In 1939 he emigrated to the United States, and later became an American citizen, apparently because he found British literary society too claustrophobic. Shortly after the move he met the love of his life, Chester Kallman, with whom he was to share credit for a number of opera librettos (including Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress), and several very messy domiciles, in New York, in Greece, and in Austria. Despite infidelities on both sides, the relationship was to continue throughout their lives, though Kallman's neglect contributed substantially to the loneliness of the older poet's final years. Overindulgence in cigarettes, alcohol, and the amphetamine Benzedrine had caused his health to deteriorate, and his increasingly churlish manners had alienated his friends. He died in 1974; Kallman died a few months later.

Davenport-Hines's portrait of the poet is astute and sympathetic, and his extremely sophisticated literary interpretations are almost poetic in their own right: "Auden's shrewdest critics see such different strengths in his work: the honey of intellect and the imperatives of ethical commitment; romanticism; tense passion; and constant, implacable political concern. These readings are not antagonistic: the meaning is most where the interpretations lie thickest."

However, the book's emphasis on concepts rather than facts occasionally gives it a rather cryptic atmosphere; one senses that pictures are incomplete. Readers unfamiliar with Auden's life may find Carpenter's fact-filled (and longer) biography more satisfying. Nonetheless, Davenport-Hines's work, obviously the product of passionate involvement with Auden's writing, contains illuminating analysis, and makes interesting connections between his beliefs and the writings of lesser-known twentieth-century thinkers. And he supplies enough biography to make it clear that Auden fulfilled the aspiration set out in his early poem "September 1, 1939," a poem he later repudiated for not meeting his high standards for "truth":

Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.