Quote:
Originally Posted by pynch
It might be too early in the morning for me to try to explain this, but I think that writers publish their texts and not their lives. And as I worship their writings, anything I add could only reduce them.
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Many of the writers whose work is defined popularly by their bios would agree with you.
Cf. E. Hemingway, V. Woolf, C. Isherwood, K. Acker, E. St-V Millay, etc. I suspect that even the confessional poets would have concurred (Berryman, Lowell, Sexton, Snodgrass, Plath). Sylvia Plath probably said as much in some interview I've forgotten.
Baudelaire would have laughed, sneered or both at the thought of his bio being important. The astonishingly humble Mr. Keats would have shrugged at the idea, unable to comprehend that any reader could sustain the merest whisper of an interest in K.'s life.