W. H. Auden was the greatest English poet of the twentieth century. As witness to many of the century's pivotal moments - Berlin in the 1920s, Spain and China in the 1930s, wartime and postwar America - and because of his consuming quest to translate the soical, political, and cultural upheavals into poetry, his importance at century's end is undeniable. Contains an Index. "Literary biography at its best, above all because Davenport-Hines never forgets that the poetry is the only reason for writing a biography in the first place, and because he recognizes that a good poem will always be more than the sum of its sources." John Gross, Sunday Telegraph

(Key Words: Biography, Poems, Poetry, Poets, William Butler Yeats, Charles Literature, W. H. Auden, Literary Criticism, Twentieth Century, English Literature, New York, Charles Williams, Stephen Spender, Marcel Proust, Edward Mendelson, Louis MacNiece, Chester Kallman, Christopher Isherwood, Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, Louise Bogan, Wystan Hugh Auden, Hannah Arendt, Homosexuality, Richard Davenport-Hines).