Where Auden really shines is in its portrayal of the life. ... Sometimes biographers work at a remove from their subjects. Not so Mr. Ackroyd. Skillfully collating the accounts of Auden’s intimates, he offers details about the poet’s sexuality, psyche, cratering appearance and deteriorating habits that are painful to contemplate. They make one (almost) want to turn away—or seek solace in the poetry.
Covers all the bases and is not, strictly speaking, actually dull: no life of Auden could possibly be dull. But what we get here is chronology, not electricity ... A better biography might have captured more: Humphrey Carpenter’s W. H. Auden: A biography (1981) still comes closest. Then again, in a life of finite duration, why bother with biographies? Maybe don’t read Auden. Read Auden instead.
Peter Ackroyd, author of novels, biographies, and general histories, in his interesting new biography of Auden, does not expend much time on rating Auden as a poet ... The portrait that emerges from Ackroyd’s Auden, especially of the poet’s later years, is ultimately a deprecating one. What recommends it is that it also happens to be persuasive and, finally, sadly truthful.
In Peter Ackroyd, Auden has an estimable biographer whose own career stands comparison with the poet’s for industry and commitment to his art ... Auden is a slippery subject ... Regardless, Ackroyd gamely tries to pin his man down with some characteristically punchy declarations of his own ... Perhaps also he has found a subject too unwieldy to cast any sort of net over in 400 pages.
Ackroyd generally writes in a style that is decently sober. He eschews the cliffhanger and ends most chapters with bracing flatness, none more so than the very last one ... Though Ackroyd makes us feel like we know Auden the man, he gives us little sense of Auden the craftsman ... The book reads like the finished article, crisp and polished, but it almost asks us to believe that the poems were born as the finished article, too.
In comparison to Nicholas Jenkins’s obsessively detailed account of early Auden, The Island (2024), Ackroyd’s book can feel more survey-like ... That said, Ackroyd paints Auden as a poet with hawk’s vision and a masochistic streak, full of moral certitude but just as prone to weep at Garbo films or be overtaken by swamps of self-torment.
Neatly weaves together biographical detail with literary commentary ... Fans of Auden might be left wanting more literary exegesis ... But the facts of the poet’s life are poetic: Auden lived a tragicomedy, sometimes by design. Ackroyd gives us an eminently readable new biography that is, from start to finish, both frequently funny and profoundly sad.
Ackroyd, who began as a poet, is adept at technical analysis of Auden’s work and delineates the various phases of his career ... There is a particularly well-framed analysis of Auden’s strict adherence to traditional poetic forms illuminated by parallelisms with his obsession with crosswords ... The incidents and personalities of Auden’s life are all represented, and Ackroyd is an acute surveyor of the poet’s psychology ... A definitive achievement written with verve, and an appreciation of a poetic corpus, but one will leave it with a moral horror of Auden.
Entertaining but curiously denuded ... Peter Ackroyd is a fine biographer and, even nearing 80, a first-rate crafter of nonfiction. And if his Auden ultimately amounts to him telling stories about WH Auden for 350 pages (as it must, without knowing how he knows any of the things in it), there are certainly worse fates for a reading afternoon. Readers wanting to know who said what to whom when and why will probably end up wanting some supplementary material.
A worthy successor to previous biographies ... Ackroyd is an astute and appreciative observer of this great poet’s life. Recommended for most libraries.
Ackroyd gives us a year-by-year (at times, even a day-by-day) life of Auden, rich with detail on the places he lived and the people he loved ... There’s relatively little extended literary criticism here, and nothing on the complex reputation Auden has had in the half century since his death. Professors of literature will find the book less textured than recent studies by Edward Mendelson and Nicholas Jenkins. But for readers who value linear, character-driven narrative, written in a direct conversational style, this is a book for them ... The lives and loves of W.H. Auden, told with flair and flourish.
