The usual notion that the earliest Auden is apolitical, as voiced by Jarrell or Spender (e.g., in the famous remark that Auden "came to politics by way of psychology"), is true only in a very qualified sense: that is, by excluding his political poems from consideration….

The reason why Auden came to politics by way of psychology is that Auden's pre-1932 psychology contained a very powerful political element. It was a psychology that definitely preferred action to contemplation…. (p. 256)

To be sure, the psychopolitics of Poems (1928 and 1930) tend to be of a rather odd sort. Much of the earlier volume is incorporated into the later one, which, while generally speaking more descriptive and less violent than its predecessor, is still full of birds, unidentified interlocutors, illdefined frontiers, and quarrels over unnamed issues. The framework, however—the sociopolitical framework—for both volumes is chiefly the school or the...