Auden's friends didn't sugarcoat things either ... He was not a poet of grand romantic illusions but of pragmatism, humor, and an almost brutal acknowledgment of the human condition. In one of his ...
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 ...