Auden's friends didn't sugarcoat things ... in the honesty of his weathered face. His poetry, like his appearance, was unadorned and honest. He was not a poet of grand romantic illusions but of ...
W.H. Auden was, in the final decade of his life, an extraordinarily unattractive man, and was keenly aware of it. "My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain," he told an interviewer in ...