Everybody knows a poem or two by W.H. Auden. There’s ‘Night Mail’ and its train rhythms written for an Associated British Picture Corporation film about the GPO back in 1936; what’s often known as ‘Funeral Blues’, movingly declaimed by John Hannah inFour Weddings and a Funeral; perhaps ‘Musée de Beaux Arts’ (‘About suffering they were never wrong’) or the untitled poem which begins ‘Lay your sleeping head my love’.

Everybody knows what Auden looked like in old age, too: a man with a wonderful craggy landscape of a face, often with a cigarette in his hand, usually dressed in a crumpled suit. Everybody knows he was gay, and that he was a 1930s poet who was part of an outspoken and militant group of writers responding to what Auden, in his poem ‘1st September, 1939’, called ‘a low dishonest decade’, where ‘Waves of anger and fear / Circulate…