A comprehensive treatment of the subject of this chapter would involve much of what made Auden an influential writer, conceivably touching on nearly every poem, play and libretto he wrote, as well as a fair proportion of his prose, published and unpublished. Little of his writing from the 1920s and 1930s does not involve 'desire', even restricted to its psychological meanings, and with his extensive reading of Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Georg Groddeck, among others, Auden did much to adapt psychoanalytic thought for Anglo-American modernism. If he wrote some of the most memorable love poetry of his time, this also constituted a sophisticated engagement with a body of erotic and Romantic writing stretching from Plato through Petrarch and Dante to Shakespeare. Along with T. S. Eliot, he ranks as one of the most important English-language religious poets of the last hundred years, for whom the interrelation of Eros and Agape was an abiding concern. It is easier, in other words, to say what Auden wrote that does not impinge on love, sex and desire, than what does.