LITERATURE & BIOGRAPHY

The most cause of work of art is its creator, the author, and hence an explanation in term of personality and the life of the writer has been one of the oldest and best established methods of literary study.
Biography can be judged in relation to the light it throws on the actual production of poetry, but we can, of course, defend it and justify it as a study of the man of genius, of his moral, intellectual and emotional development, which has its own intrinsic interest. Finally, we can think of biography as affording materials for a systems study of the phychology of the poet and of the poetic process.
Three point of view should be carefully distinguished
- the first that biography explains and illuminates the actual product of poetry, is directly relevant
- the second point of view, shifts the centre of attention to human personality
- the third, considers biography as material for a science of future science, the phycology of artistic creation.

Biography is an ancient literary genre. First of all :
Chronologically and logically, it is part of histography. Biography makes no methodological distinction between a statesman, a general, an architect, a lawyer, and a man who plays no public role.
Cartridges view, in the view, of a biographer the poet is simply another man whose moral and intellectual development, external career, and emotional life, can be reconstructed and can be evaluated by reference to standards, usually drawn from some ethical system or code of manners.
So viewed, the problems of a biographer are simply those of a historian, he has to interpret his documents, letters, account by eye witnesses, reminiscences, autobiographical statements, and to decide questions of genuineness, thrust worthiness of witnesses, and the like.
In our context two question of literary biography are crucial. How far is the biographer justified in using the evidence of the works themselves for his purposes? How far are they results of literary biography relevant and important for an understanding of the works themselves? An affirmative answer to both questions is usually given to the first question it is assumed by practically all biographers who are specifically attracted to poet, for poets appear to offer abundant evidence usable in the writing of a biography, evidence which will be absent, or almost absent, in the class of many far more influential historical personages.
The whole view that art it self expression pure and simple, the transcript of personal feeling and experiences, is demonstrably false. There is a close relationship between the work of art the life of an author, this must never be construed as meaning that the work of art is a mere copy of life.
The biographical approach forget that a work of art is not simply the embodiment of experience but always the latest work in a series of such work; it is drama, a novel, a poem, determined, so far as it is determined at all. By literary tradition and convention. We must conclude that the biographical interpretation and use of every work of art needs careful scrutiny and examination in each care, since the work of art is not a document for biography.
The biographical frame work will also help us in studying the most obvious of all strictly developmental problem in the history of literature, the growth, maturing and possible decline of an author’s art. Biographical also accumulates the material for other question of literary history such as the reading of the poet, his personal associations with literary men, his travels, the landscape and cities he saw and lived in no biographical evidence can changes or influence critical evaluation. The frequently adduced criterion of sincerity is thoroughly false if it judges literature in terms of biographical truthfulness, correspondence to the author’s experience of feelings as they are attested by outside evidence. There is no relation between sincerity and value as art. The value of agonizingly felt love poetry perpetrated by adolescents and the dreary (however fervently felt) religious verse which fills libraries, are sufficient proof of this.