Auden Author: Peter Ackroyd ISBN-13: 978-1836391722Publisher: Reaktion BooksGuideline Price: £25Peter Ackroyd, novelist and literary biographer, perhaps most famous for his work on William Blake, has now turned his eye towards WH Auden. Ackroyd’s choice of subject, the strictly metrical grand old man of English letters, is somewhat unexpected; he has long been a champion of some of the most experimental poets writing in Britain, including JH Prynne and Iain Sinclair. Auden has been better known for the past few decades as a provider of epitaphs by way of his poetry’s use in Four Weddings and a Funeral than for his corpus as a whole. Ackroyd’s biography works to liberate the oeuvre from these shackles (although he does point one towards a hilariously morbid campaign ad for Lyndon Johnson where the president slurs out a garbled line from September, 1, 1939 as a slogan).Ackroyd, who began as a poet, is adept at technical analysis of Auden’s work and delineates the various phases of his career, examining the meters, rhyme schemes and lexical quirks Auden had adopted. There is a particularly well-framed analysis of Auden’s strict adherence to traditional poetic forms illuminated by parallelisms with his obsession with crosswords. [ The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness by Nicholas Jenkins – Opening the lid on a hermetically sealed sex lifeOpens in new window ]The incidents and personalities of Auden’s life are all represented, and Ackroyd is an acute surveyor of the poet’s psychology. Auden’s big public ideological flirtations were with Marxism and Christianity. Auden seems to have been acting the part of a political poet in his early career simply because the politically committed artist was a reliable niche to occupy. His eventual conversion to Christianity seems to have been only slightly less superficial, as he was now able to play the role of the sort of poet who versified Kierkegaard or Tillich while apathetic to the welter of mere politics. Auden emerges as a profoundly repellent personality: rude, didactic and childish. Acquaintances were prone to describe him as revolting, physically dirty, smelly and prone to eating snot out of his nose. Ackroyd also exposes Auden’s occasional incestuous ideation, and his disturbing paedophilic relationship with a schoolboy he taught, 13 years old when Auden’s interest first fixed on him. Ackroyd’s biography is a definitive achievement written with verve, and an appreciation of a poetic corpus, but one will leave it with a moral horror of Auden.Seoirse Swanton is a freelance reviewer