BOOK REVIEW : One Life Story That Deserves to Be Retold : FOX AT THE WOOD’S EDGE: A Biography of Loren Eiseley,<i> by </i> G<i> ale E. Christianson</i> . Henry Holt and Co..$29.95, 438 pages

It seems to me that the two most daunting subjects of biography are poets, because the language they used themselves is inevitably remarkable, and those who have already told their lives in autobiographies. In this light, Gale Christianson took on a double challenge in “Fox at Wood’s Edge: A Biography of Loren Eiseley.” Eiseley is remembered equally as a poet and a scientist, and his autobiography, “All the Strange Hours,” appeared in 1975, two years before his death.

But, as Christianson makes clear, Eiseley left a lot untold. His autobiography resembles a surrealist painting, with scant attention given to chronological order or verisimilitude. In fact, what the memoir does is provide a set of themes and psychological images against which the biographer can match mundane facts.

Eiseley’s is a strange story. He was a physical anthropologist by profession, chair of the anthropology department at the University of Pennsylvania for many years, but he stopped digging up bones early in his career and never made any major contributions as a scientist.

Instead, he chose to become an interpreter of science to a broad public--as an historian in “Darwin’s Century,” and as an essayist in such books about nature as “The Night Country.” In these works, he re-created his life as myth and drew from nature a sense of awe.

Eiseley had a gift for creating hauntingly memorable images. Even as he pursued undergraduate studies in science at the University of Nebraska in the late ‘20s, he contributed poetry to the Prairie Schooner, a literary magazine. Later, he would write for Harpers’ Magazine, Scientific American and even, once, for Playboy.

Christianson, a distinguished professor of arts and sciences and professor of history at the University of Indiana, tells Eiseley’s story in a conventional, chronological manner, as if to define his own style in opposition to his subject’s.

Christianson seems to have included whatever source materials he found and, perhaps because so many personal papers were destroyed, there is a mass of business correspondence that leaves an unpleasant account of the dealing and quasi-double-dealing of an ambitious writer who could command good advances.

Christianson presents a vivid picture of Eiseley’s pioneer grandparents and of the poet’s disturbed childhood. He also presents the curious story of Eiseley’s marriage to Mabel Langdon, a woman six years his senior, whom he met as an undergraduate and who seemed to have directed his career from their first meeting.

Never doubting his genius, Mabel Langdon literally followed him around taking notes as he talked in round, oratorical style, not letting a drop of poetry slip unrecorded.

I am sorry that Christianson waited until two-thirds through the text to point out Eiseley’s role as environmental visionary. Along with Rachel Carson in the 1960s, Eiseley warned of what he called the “fifth horseman” of the Apocalypse--technology.

This man-made creation seemed to him a maelstrom “consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals . . . wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in a cacophony of something which is no longer nature.”

Yet, like his hero Henry David Thoreau, Eiseley did not mix much in nature. Christianson reminds us that while an undergraduate at Harvard, Thoreau asked his family what he was to do with his life. When his mother said he could buckle on a knapsack and go out and seek his fortune, his older sister allowed he could stay home with them. That is what Thoreau did “while creating the grand illusion that the wilderness was his natural abode.”

Eiseley had no older sister, but he had Mabel Langdon, who was determined to make him famous.

The Eiseleys lived in apartments all their married life and watched nature through an upstairs window or through the windshield of a car. Not hypocrites, they were simply indoor people. At home they would not kill even a spider and frequently stopped on the road to rescue injured animals.

Eiseley explained: “I am biocentric rather than anthropocentric.” His biocentrism was rooted in science, and he deeply resented his love for nature being confused with mysticism. He hated being described as someone “lost in some kind of sectarian theology, which is outrageous.”

One admirer, the great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, commented: “Poetry and science are about as unmixable as oil and water. Yet there are exceptional scientists who succeed in making just such mixtures. Loren Eiseley is one of the exceptions.”