I think many of those who care about literature share my misgivings about the present-day vogue for enormously detailed biographies of writers. It is not only because they minister to a taste for gossip, which for many readers is more attractive than all those tiresome lines of verse. Too often they diminish the author's work by restoring it to its context of origin, the outgrowing of which is what makes it poetry. They force on the reader particularities which the author, with good reason, may have wanted to leave out. They sometimes make it impossible for us to experience the text. They turn poems into documents. I agree with Alfred Tennyson in yearning for the days ‘Before the Love of Letters, overdone / Had swamped the sacred poets with themselves.’ The ideal condition for a reader is that of a child listening to a story, who cares everything about what is in the story, and nothing about who wrote it.

But in the adult world things cannot be as simple as that. Often we cannot help having an image of the author behind the page. Sometimes this is part of our pleasure. Some authors, we feel, are our friends. But sometimes the image of the author influences what we read to the detriment of the work. For that image can be grossly misleading, the product of myths and unreliable anecdotes and baseless prejudices.