Volume 27, Number 1 · February 7, 1980
Poet's Gallery
By Helen Vendler
Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings
by Richard S. Kennedy
Liveright, 529 pp., $19.95
Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters
by Marjorie Perloff
University of Texas Press, 234 pp., $7.95 (paper)
The indisputable relation between writers' works and their lives becomes disputable as soon as it is enunciated. The 'pure' biography which mentions works in chronological order but makes no attempt at criticism is restful and serene; at its best, it creates no powerful myth of explanation, but arranges a responsible and persuasive and unobtrusively well written narrative out of the facts that are known. But something in us revolts against such a biography of 'our' author; we hanker after more intimacy, or more speculation, or more criticism. We crave bias. And so the critical biography, the psychological biography, the psycho-critical biography arise to tease and to disappoint us. The only form inherently more unsatisfying than literary biography is its macroform, literary history.
Review, 4274 words
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