Volume 19, Number 6 · October 19, 1972
An Odd Couple
By W.H. Auden
Munby, Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby 1828-1910
by Derek Hudson
Gambit, 461 pp., $12.50
To his friends and acquaintances, who included such people as Rossetti, Ruskin, Swinburne, Thackeray, and Browning, Munby was a member of the professional upper middle class, a tall, handsome bachelor, a barrister (though he hated Law) who loved parties, the theater, the opera, was a member of the Athenaeum Club and the Society of Antiquities, and a gifted minor poet. From the examples of his work which Mr. Hudson gives us, I would say that he was at his best when his model was Clough and least successful when his model was Tennyson, a poet whom it is impossible to be influenced by: the result is always Tennyson and water.
Review, 2463 words
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