Volume 27, Number 16 · October 23, 1980
Getting to Know You
By Richard Ellmann
W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet
by Charles Osborne
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 336 pp., $17.95
'A shilling life will give you all the facts,' Auden said mockingly in one of his imaginary portraits. The facts could never encompass the workings of the impetuous heart. Mr. Osborne's biography, the first in the field, offers chiefly facts; most are not new, unfortunately, and some, as Stephen Spender and others have complained, are not accurate. Except where Auden's autobiographical remarks come to Mr. Osborne's aid, the context in which a being might move connectedly from incident to incident is either absent or impoverished. Auden is dangled about on a long line, dipped into one pool after another: always bait and never fish.
Review, 3432 words
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