Stephen Spender John Sutherland Viking, 627pp, £25 ISBN 0670883034

The success of this biography lies in the way John Sutherland turns both himself and his readers into "Spenders", so to speak, for the duration of the book. We begin with a striking pedigree - Jewish, English, German, even Danish (Spender was often told he looked like a benevolent Viking). Father and uncle were both journalists: uncle (J A Spender) a good deal more successful than father (Harold). Mother was a Schuster from the Frankfurt banking family who valiantly plugged, as far as she could, the recurrent holes in the family budget. She died in her early forties, leaving three sons and a daughter. Stephen, the second son, had a rather haphazard education, under the shadow of his academically successful elder brother. But at Oxford he met and was inspired by Isaiah Berlin and W H Auden, hand-printing some of Auden's earliest and most brilliantly characteristic poems, and beginning to write his own.

Germany was then the place for boyfriends, and, like Christopher Isherwood, Spender duly found them there. Hellmut, who knew no English and with whom Stephen conversed in pidgin German, was a brooding and gloomy youth - Isherwood remarked that he should have been christened "Dunkelmut". Much more important was English Tony. Following a spell in the British army, Tony volunteered for the International Brigade when the Spanish war broke out. But after becoming profoundly disillusioned, he had to be rescued by Spender, sent out as a reporter during his brief incarnation as a card-carrying communist.

Back home, in 1936, Spender met Inez Pearn, an American eight years his senior, and a love affair developed. She was not his first female lover - there had been Muriel Gardiner in Vienna, also older and more experienced in both love and politics. Spender and Inez decided not to have children in a world threatened by Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. His friends were amused and suspected that Tony, playing the part of a secretary, was still really "the One". "How is your little wife?" Isherwood wrote mischievously, "& that delightful fellow your . . . secretary?"

Before he could be called up, Spender joined the fire service just as the Blitz was beginning. Inez fell in love with a scientist-poet from Cambridge, Charles Madge, and a divorce had to be arranged. Shortly afterwards Stephen met Natasha Litvin, a concert pianist who was - for a change - ten years younger than him. When old Mrs Schuster asked Natasha if she were Jewish, she shocked her by replying: "Half, but I am illegitimate." The couple were ideally suited, and there was no question of their not having children: at the end of the war Matthew was born, and Lizzie a few years later. Natasha continued a distinguished career in music, while Stephen, invalided out of the fire service with painful if unromantic varicose veins, got on with his writing alongside co-editing the successful wartime magazine Horizon with Cyril Connolly.

Horizon was the forerunner of the equally successful Anglo-American Encounter, the British end of which Spender looked after from 1953 onward, although he did not always see eye to eye with his American co-editors Irving Kristol and Melvin Lasky. When Encounter began to run a deficit, the offer of assistance from Cecil King of the Daily Mirror was welcomed, even though Spender was warned that King had connections with the CIA. Although he put on a good front, Spender was privately agonised when the significance of this involvement eventually became clear. Inevitably, connections between Encounter and the CIA could not be disguised for long from its writers and readers. At a party held by Louis MacNeice, William Empson, an old friend, angered Spender so much by casting aspersions that the exasperated poet threw a glass of wine at him. Empson wrote to say that his antique garments would hardly show up another stain, but renewed the accusation that the magazine was taking lavish quantities of American money, disguised as high-minded international funding, in order to disseminate US propaganda. He threw in a few sarcasms about Spender's "American playmates", and when Spender made an angry reply Empson declared their friendship over.

There is something splendidly old-fashioned about two poets battling over ideas and principles in this way, but it was no fun for Spender at the time. He often expressed his extreme dislike of ideology, and yet found himself unable to escape it. His naivety was part of his essential goodness. Powerful men made use of him, were as nice to him as could be, but secretly rather despised him. Spender realised this, writing in his journal that the "Cambridge spies" Blunt, Burgess and Maclean all treated him with contempt. "I don't know whether this was because I was an ex-communist, or a liberal, or an innocent. What they all had was the arrogance of manipulators who thought they could manage other people."

However much it was out of place in a world of ideology and intrigue, Spender's simplicity (reminding his friends of Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin) characterised both his manner and his poetry. Iris Murdoch, who loved discussing poetry, people and ideas with him, used to say he sometimes reminded her of a large amiable elephant, looking at you benevolently with its little eyes: eyes not without cunning, in poet and elephant alike, but in Spender cunning had been transmuted into an infectious and delightful humour.

Spenderian directness, the hallmark of his poetry, also emerges in his remarks. He told a surprised acquaintance that, having tried both sexes, he greatly preferred sleeping with women. He could say such things without any appearance of trying to startle or show off. This absence of showing-off is crucial in his poetry, in which there are none of the verbal spells of Auden or the fervent rhetoric of Yeats. When Spender writes about a battle or an air raid he makes no pretence of having experienced it. But his imagination is more convincing than the starkest of reportage.

However, by the 1950s and 1960s his poetry was no longer fashionable. During those decades, as Sutherland drily remarks: "F R Leavis's proteges were graduating into posts of cultural power. Their blackest beasts were Spender and the British Council (whose favourite lecturer was Spender)." There emerged a standard Leavisite method for anathematising Spender. As he put it: "They review me, not my poems."

John Sutherland has written a superlative biography. He has combined tact with a straightforwardness like Spender's own. His study also challenges the misconceptions that have surrounded Spender since the 1960s. Sutherland emphasises that he was not like the other poets of his time with whom he is so often grouped. Spender is - and I think will remain - very much his own man and his own poet.

John Bayley's The Power of Delight: a lifetime in literature is published by Duckworth in November

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