W.H. Auden’s virtuosity masked careful craftsmanship
‘Begin with the name,’ begins Peter Ackroyd. ‘Wystan is singular and arresting. Auden himself… confessed that he would be furious if he found that anyone else possessed it.’ It is certainly a name on which much ink has been spilt. Ackroyd’s biography comes barely 18 months after Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island, an exhaustive study of the poet and his work up to 1939 and his flight to America. Unlike Jenkins’s book, Ackroyd’s has the advantage of being a life rather than a half-life, though it accelerates through the later years as Auden tipped into ‘premature old age’. The frequent quotations also help the pacing, though we might have wanted chunkier
