Mendelson's frank yet delicate treatment of Auden's sexuality affirms, for me, the passion in beautiful lines such as "Lay your sleeping head, my love/Human on my faithless arm." Also, it elucidates the language of the poems. Auden, aware of his homosexuality since adolescence, hoped briefly in 1928 to be made straight through psychoanalysis. In his poems and letters he used the word "crooked" to mean homosexual (as in "the crooked that dreads to be straight"). Later, Mendelson tells us, the words "crooked" and "straight" served him differently: "When have we not preferred some going round/To going straight where we are?" Auden writes, and Mendelson construes: "By learning to love someone rather like himself, Auden had gone straight to where he was, and...by accepting his sexuality he had discovered it to be in the deepest sense not crooked but straight."

Striking details characterize a man who defied the rigid gender definitions of his time. Auden wore a wedding ring and wrote to his brother, John: "This time, my dear, I really believe it's marriage." He contended that marriage (Rimbaud and Verlaine, for example) was any sexual relation governed by vows, indifferent to gender. And for a time Auden lost his solitariness to marriage.

Apparently love generated hope, though some aspirations were denied later. "September 1, 1939," whose date refers to the Nazi invasion of Poland and the advent of European war, begins in gloom and ends in faith:

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.

In later years, Auden renounced that hope. Mendelson tells us that in 1944 he abandoned the famous stanza ending "We must love one another or die," and in 1957 he confided to a critic that he loathed the poem. That curious dismissal of what is, after all, a great poem, is at least placed into perspective by Mendelson, who says Auden had regretted the poem for years. Before the outbreak of World War II, the poet had believed passionately that history moves inevitably toward a just future, as differentiated from a Marxian view of necessary violence. He was troubled in August 1939 when he heard radio reports of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Germany's seizure of Danzig and Britain's alliance with Poland. Events were caused not by universal love but, as Auden had feared, by politicians: "helpless governors wake/to resume their compulsory game." He was horrified when, in 1939, he went to a German-language cinema and the audience applauded a newsreel about the conquest of Poland. Mendelson relates: "Auden's beliefs had been unsettled by the outbreak of war, but he had not understood how deeply they had been shaken until he witnessed national and racial hatred at first hand."

Indeed, the remarkable impact ofLater Auden is of a man who shifts from one stance to another, continually correcting his moral position. Disillusioned with Soviet Russia after the Moscow trials of 1936, Auden discovered in Spain, where he volunteered to drive an ambulance for the socialist government, that Franco's enemies found themselves implicated with Stalinist agents. Later, at 33, he returned to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at 16. In his Christianity he was inspired notably by Paul Tillich, the theologian who, while looking heavenward, worked actively to attain justice on earth. Then, during the later years of World War II, Auden read widely in Judaism, attempting to find his way from a personal religion to a communal one.

As his views changed, so did his forms. He wrote in Horatian stanzas, sonnets, villanelles, the syllabic verse he came to value in later life. Often his formal practices were emblematic, as in the wide array of conventional forms used in The Sea and the Mirror--canzone, sestina, prose--for voices that are characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest. I marvel at his daring mixture of elegant and demotic diction in set forms, which is followed today by poets such as Tony Harrison and Marilyn Hacker.

Mendelson, in discussing the verse, concentrates not only on major works such as "For the Time Being" and The Age of Anxiety but praises lesser-known, very late poems that include "River Profile," "First Things First" and three sonnets, "Objects," "Words" and "The Song." This is a major study of a poet whose cries against social injustice resound far beyond his time and place: In Auden's "The Shield of Achilles," Hephaestus forges not a fair scene but "a weed-choked field," where

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

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