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Biographies can be wearisome contrivances, often too long and too detailed for their own good. Biographers make the mistake of spending too much time worshipping their subjects. Think of the authoritative three-volume life of Robert Frost by Lawrence Thompson, for example, and how the biographer passed, over the many years of its making, from hero worship to intense dislike of the poet he shadowed for almost a quarter of a century. Yes, too long and intense an acquaintance can lead to sourness. As the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth on February 12th approaches, it is good to welcome a biography which is relatively small, but in no way superficial or meager. Ruth Padel has achieved this feat by writing her great-great-grandfather's life in a sequence of often quite short poems. Through her verses she seeks to capture the "voice" of Darwin. Ms Padel embeds many of Darwin's own words— from his books or his letters—in her poems, and the results tend to give the sense of being jointly authored. Sometimes she shapes entire pieces of quotation into her own poetic passages. If this seems to be a bit of sly plagiarism, it doesn't feel like it. It feels more like a skillful act of collaboration between the living and the dead, one melding easily with the other. Why does this book work so well? How does it manage to say so much in so few words? Ms Padel seems to have caught the essence of the man's character, as if in a butterfly net. She enters into his cast of mind, bringing across his hyper-sensitivity, his sense of fragility, his lifelong boldness, and the poems are a sequence of snapshots—often small, intermittent and delicately imagistic—of particularly crucial incidents in his life; of moments of intellectual illumination. It is not easy to describe a whole life in relatively few words. You need to find some way of filling in the background. Ms Padel has overcome this problem by having paragraphs of notes run, in a single column, beside the texts of the poems so that they can be read side by side. And why are poems a good way of illuminating a life such as Darwin's? The best lyric poems— think of Keats or Shelley, for example—are moments of sudden insight. And Darwin, throughout, was in the grip of something very similar: a terrible, destabilizing sense of wonder. He sensed hints of the marvelous everywhere he looked. All the sadder then—and this is something that Ms Padel does not explain—that, later in life, the man who carried with him on the Beagle Channel a copy of Milton's "Paradise Lost" found that he could no longer enjoy poetry.
单选题11.According to the author, biographies can become boring because they are too