W.H. Auden spent decades treating love as a subject for research rather than pure inspiration, reading widely in psychology and philosophy and filling notebooks with observations before a line of poetry ever appeared. This film follows scholars and experts through that process, using interviews to reconstruct how a poet best known for lines like those in 'Funeral Blues' actually worked. When Auden died in 1973, most of his private papers were destroyed, but two short journals and a set of jottings survived, and the film puts their diagrams and notes on screen as evidence of a rigorous, almost scientific method behind the verse. Director Susanna White treats the poems themselves as data points, matching specific images and phrases back to the ideas Auden was testing in his notebooks. The result is less a biography of a famous poet than a case study in how someone tried to pin down an emotion everyone assumes is beyond analysis.