“I thought perhaps,” she purred, “that they preferred only spiritual food.”An exhausting cycle of commitment and disillusion lay ahead, creating gods and then dismissing them. Looking into heaven over Byron’s shoulder in Letters from Iceland, he asked “Are poets saved?” The question still nagged two years later, when he and Isherwood were entertained to tea by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. By the end of his life, his personal griefs and the cultural disasters of the century were incised in the furrows and crevasses of his skin. In 1935, negotiating a truce between revolution and theology, he described the strain of the activity: “Christianity is a twice-born catastrophic religion.

The headlines of worry and anguished grimaces written on the mask eventually penetrated to the face beneath, etching it with what he called “professional creases”. Justifying this facial armour, he argued that “everything we think .. modifies our bodies”. In fact, the temptation lay elsewhere: Auden, never a classroom tyrant, did become a common-room bore. and the games master lives on the raw flesh of freshly killed stags.”More seriously, since he thought of his own school as a prototype of the fascist state, Auden wondered, in a 1937 sociological study, if teaching might not be demagoguery by other means, appealing to the love of power, “freedom from contradiction, and the company of the immature”.

The teacher may be a spy, adopting the role for other, unlicensed purposes. While employed at Downs School, Auden wrote a campy narrative for the school magazine in which a bibulous and pederastic master escorts a party of boys to Transylvania. Failing to guard the morals of his charges, he boasts to Dracula’s compatriots about his school’s swanky credentials: “The headmaster never appears except in spurs … The Auden who called England his “tutrix” and commended “our intelligent island” contributed a reading list to the Birmingham Town Crier, with notes on vocabulary cribs and comprehension tests for 10- to 14-year-olds.His irony prompts an immediate qualification. Teaching is a drab and dutiful business, conducted in a fug of chalk dust. Although the Marxist in him extolled activism, he also paid tribute to “those who pray”, who “mediate between God and man” – or between abstract ideas and the grubby, uproarious boys at the back of the classroom. The elderly Auden mocked himself as a “minor transatlantic Goethe”.

Auden, who worked as a schoolteacher during the early 1930s, described the development of the profession in a long tract on the educational industry; the beak, he thought, was a latter-day monk. He made a more ruthless demand on himself when – in the hope that Christianity might resolve the dispute between Marx and Freud – he insisted that “the secret of good art is the same as the secret of a good life”.The emphasis is unashamedly didactic, even parsonical. He assessed his tan, his profile, his easy fluency: here, he admitted, was “something I shall never be”. Discussing the demotic appeal of limericks, doggerel and nursery rhymes, he remarked with the same ruefulness that this was “the kind of poetry I should like to write but can’t”.

Isherwood praised Auden’s indifference to Japanese air raids: he “slept deeply, with the long, calm snores of the truly strong”. Despite the compliment, Auden blamed himself for not attaining heroic impersonality.In Iceland, he glanced enviously at a “real professional English traveller”. The Truly Weak Man must be transformed into the Truly Strong Man. T E Lawrence, changing his name and discarding his chivalric fancy dress to enlist in the air force, exemplified this austere modern valour, as Auden pointed out in a 1934 review of Liddell Hart’s biography. In league with Isherwood, he elaborated a boyish saga about the need for the fractious self to be annihilated by a virile, grown-up identity. Sometimes he managed the feat through dialectical sleight-of-hand: “There is,” he argued in a New Verse essay on surrealism, “a rough and ready parallelism between the Conscious and the Unconscious, and the Masses and the Communist Party”.