A Love Affair With Language : The words themselves seem reward enough for Thomas Lux. But now the poet’s devotion to his craft has earned him this country’s top prize for a single work.

It was a typical week for news and national events: financial scandals, Republicans frolicking with live elephants on the Capitol steps, a maybe-no-but-ultimately- yes baseball season and oh, yes, that trial.

Not exactly the stuff of gentle rhyme; hardly the makings of contemplative verse.

Unless, like Thomas Lux, you heed these happenings as further evidence of the urgency of the poet’s mission. Computerspeak, political cynicism and a steady avalanche of callow business school graduates “make it even more important to keep doing it,” Lux said, “really trying to get poems out there that might matter.”

Lux’s compelling rhythms, his biting irony and his steady devotion to a craft that often seems thankless are what helped earn him this country’s largest poetry prize honoring a single work. The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award at the Claremont Graduate School carries a purse of $50,000--a poet’s vision of a significant king’s ransom. Conferred in recognition of Lux’s collection, “Split Horizons” (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), it is scheduled to be presented at noon today at Claremont Colleges.

At the same ceremony, Doug Anderson, a teacher at a Massachusetts community college, will receive the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Poetry for his book, “The Moon Reflected Fire” (Alice James Books / University of Maine, 1994). The latter prize recognizes an emerging poet and carries an award of $5,000.

“One writes poems never expecting anything (particularly money) back for that effort,” said Lux, 48. “When one does get something back, it is a great gift--a blessing.”

These days, concurred Stanley Kunitz, the 90-year-old eminence grise of American poetry, “a poet must not look for rewards in terms of money or fame, but within himself, or herself--the sense of fulfillment that is perhaps impossible except through poetry.”

Lux’s editor and fellow poet, Peter Davison, agreed that “it takes guts” to write poetry in these strange, waning days of the century. But as Lux observed, “this is not something one chooses to do.” Rather, “it is something I was drawn to. I do it because I love to do it, and because I don’t have any choice. If I don’t write, I feel empty and lost.”

Besides, Lux continued, “poetry exists because there is no other way to say the things that get said in good poems except in poems. There is something about the right combination of metaphor or image connected to the business of being alive that only poems can do. To me, it makes me feel more alive, reading good poetry.”

But growing up on a dairy farm in western Massachusetts, Lux knew little of the mysteries of metaphor. His father was the milkman in a town where every other relative worked in a grim, decaying factory. His mother answered telephones at the local Sears & Roebuck store. Casualties of the Depression, neither parent finished high school. Both were determined to do better by their only child.

A bookish boy, Lux found his way to words at the town library. The Russian novelists, Dostoevsky in particular, unleashed in him joys he could scarcely fathom. Contemporary poetry remained uncharted ground. “I didn’t know there were such things as living poets because all the books stopped in 1940,” he remembered.

His Odyssey into poetry began in his student years at Boston’s small, arty Emerson College. By 25, he was publishing his first book, “Memory’s Handgrenade” (Pym-Randall Press, 1972).

But if his early literary success helped guarantee him a future of academic appointments, it brought scant consolation to the dairy farm. “My mother used to say, ‘if you have to write, why don’t you write stories?,’ ” Lux said. Two and a half decades of grants, accolades and a dozen-plus books of poetry have done little to change that opinion. Even today, Lux said, his parents tell people that he’s a teacher.

With his barrel chest and his silky, shoulder-length blond hair, Lux is part hod carrier, part friendly lion. He wears owlish glasses and an easy smile that flashes brightest of all at the mention of his 7-year-old daughter, Claudia. Divorced, Lux shares custody of his only child. As a result, his weekly commute is nearly 500 miles, from his teaching job at Sarah Lawrence College outside Manhattan, to this Boston suburb. In the fall, the commute will stretch farther still as Lux takes on a temporary assignment at UC Irvine.

But the trappings of his trade--his brain, a note pad, a pencil--accompany him wherever he goes. Lux is fiercely, proudly computer illiterate. Each poem for him is a product of relentless effort. A single title may require 30 drafts and revisions. In a prolific year, Lux turns out from 10 to 12 poems. An extraordinary year might yield 20.

“It’s a craft, and art form,” Lux said. “And for me, at least, to do it well is very hard work.

“The whole point is, you break your behind to make it look simple. Everyone knows that a dancer works for 15 years to jump up and down like a gazelle once on a stage,” Lux said. “For me, to make a poem seem that way too, I have to sweat blood.”

His fastidiousness does not go unnoticed. “There are some poets who suddenly leap into glamorous prominence,” said Davison, poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly and at Houghton Mifflin. “There are others who simply work hard and well.

“I have known Lux’s work since he started writing,” Davison added, “and it gets better with every book.”

James Ragan director of the professional writing program at the University of Southern California and author, most recently, of a collection of poems called “The Hunger Wall” (Grove Press, 1995), praised “the freshness” of Lux’s writing. “And the imagery of his work,” Ragan continued. “I was really struck by the imagery.”

For example, “Split Horizons” contains a poem called “Virgule” that is effectively a paean to a punctuation mark. “History Books” laments the lack of aroma in chronicles of ages past:

“That is, their authors leave out one thing: the smell. . . .”

“Cows” is a bovine love song, complete with onomatopoeic pasture noises. “Endive” mixes “vegetable and moral metaphor.” “Emily’s Mom” suggests that Mrs. Dickinson was clinically depressed.

His range of subject matter makes him “ sui generis, his own kind of poet, unlike any of the fashions of the time,” said Kunitz.

“He has a certain freedom of the spirit, a good sense of verbal play, a strong perception and exploration of the self,” Kunitz said. “And out of it comes something imaginative, wry and a mixture of meditation and joy.” Lux’s poems “are never superficial,” Kunitz went on. “They spring out of the tension between the self and the universe.”

Lux’s range of topics is fueled by the voracious, unquelled appetite for reading that began in childhood. In adulthood, however, he dines mainly in the land of nonfiction, reading at least 100 books of history and biography each year.

But as a writer, poetry propels him. “I am drawn to the distilled quality of poetry,” he explained. “It is concise, tight, precise, intense. And I am very much drawn to the music of good poetry, and how to make that music, how to make poetry that is felt in the ear, in the body.”

Lux strives also to produce accessible poetry. “I am bored to death with emotionally oblique and obscure poetry,” he said. “I think mostly this obscurity is a cover-up for the lack of anything to say.”

His directness is matched by a playful use of wit and humor. Times editorial board member Jack Miles, a judge in the Kingsley Tufts poetry competition, hails Lux’s ability to evoke a “bitter chuckle at just the wrong / right moment,” creating what Miles termed “poetry of unshed tears.”

Pairing humor with hard-edged, serious themes, Lux said, “I like to make the reader laugh--and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humor.”

Increasingly, Lux said, that view seems to be spreading among a widespread constituency. Poetry workshops are burgeoning at libraries, community centers and YMCA’s all over the country. Doctors, stockbrokers, even lawyers sign up for private poetry lessons. Whereas once he lectured and read primarily on college campuses, Lux now meets crowds in coffeehouses, and sometimes, coffee shops in shopping malls.

“I read my poems to any kind of audience, and they respond,” he said.

His own explanation for this poetic renewal is that “people are sick to death of being buried in pyrotechnics,” high-speed, high-tech car crashes in movies and noisy, tuneless, overproduced rock concerts.

“I think people long for substance, not the continuing triumph of style over substance,” Lux said. In poetry, “there is only the voice. No band. No flashing lights. No props.”

But if a poet is lucky, smart and talented, there is good language, phrases that, as Emily Dickinson put it, take the top of your head off.

Because finally, said Lux, “language is what we have, the only thing we have--the only thing we have, really, to communicate to each other with.”