Fears That I May Cease to Be
by Robert Roper
OCTOBER 20, 2009 TAGS:
Why do poets die young? They do, you know – younger than most other people, and significantly younger than other writers (novelists, playwrights, journalists). The current film Bright Star brings this to mind. It tells the story of the last years of John Keats, one of the iconic dead poets of the English-speaking world (others would be Shelley, Byron, and Plath). Keats died at age 25, and according to filmmaker Jane Campion, his last years mostly involved his infatuation with a seductive seamstress, with all that writing of immortal lyrics incidental to the romance.
Contemporary psychologists have unearthed strong associations between poetry and introspection, between introspection and depression, and between depression and self-destructiveness. Not all poets are depressives, but there is a statistical connection. If that child of yours is writing a poem at this moment, go into his bedroom right now and stop him! Go on, don’t fool around! He’ll thank you for it later. Talk up the advantages of biochemistry, or the law. Steer him toward the light.
This year marks the 200th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, a tortured poet if ever there was one. Biographers know a great deal about almost every aspect of his life, but no one knows what he was up to in the days just before he died.On Oct. 3, 1849, Poe turned up at a tavern in Baltimore wearing cheap clothes that were not his own. He was in “great distress,” according to a local man who recognized him; “rather the worse for wear” he was, which probably means at the end of a tremendous bender. Oct. 3 was election day in Baltimore, and the grog-shop where Poe appeared was a polling place; it was common for men to be paid, often with strong drink, for voting more than once, and some changed their clothes so as not to be recognized.
He was a binge drinker, was Edgar Allan. He knew that drinking was killing him, and for months he might cling to the wagon, but then a situation would arise – usually, friends wanting to buy him a few – and the volume and savagery of the ensuing taking-on of a load were stunning. He drank to erase himself, to obliterate all consciousness. And he drank that way more and more. Taken to a hospital on that fateful election day, he developed a tremor of the extremities and subsided into “a busy, but not violent or active delirium,” according to the attending physician. It was suggested to Poe that he would soon be visited by his many Baltimore friends. He replied that the best thing his best friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol.
Blow out his teeming, productive brains: These were the same brains that had produced “The Bells,” “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Conqueror Worm,” among other famous poems. That had composed The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-tale Heart, The Purloined Letter, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue – the last two the first examples in our literature of that inexhaustible genre, the detective story. Incidentally, Poe invented modern literary criticism as well, arguing in his reviews for an aesthetic rather than a moral reading of literature, anticipating the New Critics and others in asserting the autonomy of the text, independent of whatever “lessons” it might be said to offer.
Poe was justifiably proud of his fecund brain, yet he wished to destroy it. The cult of the gifted poet who ruins himself at an early age persists among us because it answers to a fear that is also, somehow, a hope: the fear that speaking with the tongue of primal inspiration is akin to going down into the depths of madness, and the hope that madness may find a cure in expression, an apotheosis. Poets need to be insane to write great things, the theory goes, and poets’ visionary writings are the only cure for our larger human derangement.
This theory almost never works out very well in practice, though. There are many examples of great poets who were not at all mad (although remarkably few good poets are not touched by a degree of eccentricity). Probably the most famous post-Poe poet who was self-destructive in the manner of Poe was Dylan Thomas, who died on Nov. 9, 1953, at age 39. (Poe was 40.) Thomas was not a fan or follower of Poe’s, especially, but there are points of affinity between them: Both were hugely popular during their lifetimes, with sonorous, seductive voices; both were dreadfully poor most of their adult lives, despite being prolific writers whose work was published widely. And both drank too much on an election day. The legend of Dylan Thomas has it that he drank 18 straight whiskies at the White Horse Tavern in New York on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 1953, turned to a companion and said, “There, I think that’s the record,” and keeled over dead in the gutter.
In fact, he spent the evening of Nov. 3 drinking at the White Horse, but only moderately. Thomas was not an obliterative or self-destructive drinker. As James Nashold, an American neurologist, and George Tremlett, a British biographer, show in their excellent book The Death of Dylan Thomas, the poet died of brain damage suffered during a diabetic coma, not from an “alcoholic insult to the brain,” as the death certificate has it. He had been diabetic since his teens, and in the pubs in his native Wales he was regarded as a lightweight, since he was in the habit of nursing a single pint through long, loquacious evenings.
In America, where he embarked on four epic lecture tours in the last four years of his life, he succumbed to the drinking habits of the racy colonials, going in for whisky as well as his habitual beer. He became world-famous in the course of those four tours, and he enjoyed the attentions of adoring women. A doctor he met injected him with cortisone to sober him up before appearances, and this same doctor also prescribed benzedrine as a pick-me-up.
The steroids had the effect of increasing the glucose level in his blood. For a diabetic not being treated with insulin, as Thomas was not, regular cortisone use has the effect of decreasing the utility of whatever natural insulin the patient still produces. On the day after election day, feeling sick and in low spirits, Thomas holed up at the Chelsea Hotel, and his doctor friend came by and injected him with morphine three times – the last injection, of a full half grain of the drug, made Thomas’ coma irreversible.
Well, you say. So he did drink himself to death. He came to America of his own free will, he started mixing whisky with beer, he took up with fast women, and in the course of things he fell into the hands of a Dr. Feelgood, someone willing to supply him with whatever he wanted. He was out of control, then. He had his poetic reasons, of course: He drank for relief of psychic pain, for loneliness in philistine America, for the torture of lacking the time to write new poetry. He was drinking to suppress despair or erase consciousness of it – which is no different from drinking to obliterate.
True, too true. But Thomas had never been a poet who felt he had to venture over the edge of madness to write. His many draft versions of great poems show him to have been a relentless reviser, tinkerer, reinventor. He was emphatically not the kind of poet that Keats was, who said that there was no “craft” of poetry – that poems that did not come spontaneously “had better not come” at all.
Thomas’ answer to the question, “Do you wait for a spontaneous impulse before writing a poem?” was “No. The writing of a poem is, to me, the physical and mental task of constructing a formally watertight compartment of words,” which sounds a lot different from seeking the muse of madness. Thomas was more in line with Charles Baudelaire, who defined “Inspiration” as, “Working everyday….”
The truths of poetry were accessed not by a cudgeling of the brain via alcohol or drugs, but by sitting alone in a room, armed with a pencil. His wits were all he ever had to drive that pencil across the page. He might drink a beer or two, but his most potent stimulants were fizzy lemonade and candy – sugary concoctions to counteract a diabetic’s low blood-sugar. Thus stimulated, and thus armed, he found his way over and over into profound regions of poetic inspiration. The realm of self-destructive madness was never where he hoped to be – and when he found himself there at the end, the game was already over. He was searching not for poetic inspiration anymore, but only for a good time.
Contemporary psychologists have unearthed strong associations between poetry and introspection, between introspection and depression, and between depression and self-destructiveness. Not all poets are depressives, but there is a statistical connection. If that child of yours is writing a poem at this moment, go into his bedroom right now and stop him! Go on, don’t fool around! He’ll thank you for it later. Talk up the advantages of biochemistry, or the law. Steer him toward the light.This year marks the 200th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, a tortured poet if ever there was one. Biographers know a great deal about almost every aspect of his life, but no one knows what he was up to in the days just before he died.On Oct. 3, 1849, Poe turned up at a tavern in Baltimore wearing cheap clothes that were not his own. He was in “great distress,” according to a local man who recognized him; “rather the worse for wear” he was, which probably means at the end of a tremendous bender. Oct. 3 was election day in Baltimore, and the grog-shop where Poe appeared was a polling place; it was common for men to be paid, often with strong drink, for voting more than once, and some changed their clothes so as not to be recognized.
He was a binge drinker, was Edgar Allan. He knew that drinking was killing him, and for months he might cling to the wagon, but then a situation would arise – usually, friends wanting to buy him a few – and the volume and savagery of the ensuing taking-on of a load were stunning. He drank to erase himself, to obliterate all consciousness. And he drank that way more and more. Taken to a hospital on that fateful election day, he developed a tremor of the extremities and subsided into “a busy, but not violent or active delirium,” according to the attending physician. It was suggested to Poe that he would soon be visited by his many Baltimore friends. He replied that the best thing his best friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol.
Blow out his teeming, productive brains: These were the same brains that had produced “The Bells,” “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Conqueror Worm,” among other famous poems. That had composed The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-tale Heart, The Purloined Letter, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue – the last two the first examples in our literature of that inexhaustible genre, the detective story. Incidentally, Poe invented modern literary criticism as well, arguing in his reviews for an aesthetic rather than a moral reading of literature, anticipating the New Critics and others in asserting the autonomy of the text, independent of whatever “lessons” it might be said to offer.
Poe was justifiably proud of his fecund brain, yet he wished to destroy it. The cult of the gifted poet who ruins himself at an early age persists among us because it answers to a fear that is also, somehow, a hope: the fear that speaking with the tongue of primal inspiration is akin to going down into the depths of madness, and the hope that madness may find a cure in expression, an apotheosis. Poets need to be insane to write great things, the theory goes, and poets’ visionary writings are the only cure for our larger human derangement.This theory almost never works out very well in practice, though. There are many examples of great poets who were not at all mad (although remarkably few good poets are not touched by a degree of eccentricity). Probably the most famous post-Poe poet who was self-destructive in the manner of Poe was Dylan Thomas, who died on Nov. 9, 1953, at age 39. (Poe was 40.) Thomas was not a fan or follower of Poe’s, especially, but there are points of affinity between them: Both were hugely popular during their lifetimes, with sonorous, seductive voices; both were dreadfully poor most of their adult lives, despite being prolific writers whose work was published widely. And both drank too much on an election day. The legend of Dylan Thomas has it that he drank 18 straight whiskies at the White Horse Tavern in New York on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 1953, turned to a companion and said, “There, I think that’s the record,” and keeled over dead in the gutter.
In fact, he spent the evening of Nov. 3 drinking at the White Horse, but only moderately. Thomas was not an obliterative or self-destructive drinker. As James Nashold, an American neurologist, and George Tremlett, a British biographer, show in their excellent book The Death of Dylan Thomas, the poet died of brain damage suffered during a diabetic coma, not from an “alcoholic insult to the brain,” as the death certificate has it. He had been diabetic since his teens, and in the pubs in his native Wales he was regarded as a lightweight, since he was in the habit of nursing a single pint through long, loquacious evenings.
In America, where he embarked on four epic lecture tours in the last four years of his life, he succumbed to the drinking habits of the racy colonials, going in for whisky as well as his habitual beer. He became world-famous in the course of those four tours, and he enjoyed the attentions of adoring women. A doctor he met injected him with cortisone to sober him up before appearances, and this same doctor also prescribed benzedrine as a pick-me-up.
The steroids had the effect of increasing the glucose level in his blood. For a diabetic not being treated with insulin, as Thomas was not, regular cortisone use has the effect of decreasing the utility of whatever natural insulin the patient still produces. On the day after election day, feeling sick and in low spirits, Thomas holed up at the Chelsea Hotel, and his doctor friend came by and injected him with morphine three times – the last injection, of a full half grain of the drug, made Thomas’ coma irreversible.
Well, you say. So he did drink himself to death. He came to America of his own free will, he started mixing whisky with beer, he took up with fast women, and in the course of things he fell into the hands of a Dr. Feelgood, someone willing to supply him with whatever he wanted. He was out of control, then. He had his poetic reasons, of course: He drank for relief of psychic pain, for loneliness in philistine America, for the torture of lacking the time to write new poetry. He was drinking to suppress despair or erase consciousness of it – which is no different from drinking to obliterate.
True, too true. But Thomas had never been a poet who felt he had to venture over the edge of madness to write. His many draft versions of great poems show him to have been a relentless reviser, tinkerer, reinventor. He was emphatically not the kind of poet that Keats was, who said that there was no “craft” of poetry – that poems that did not come spontaneously “had better not come” at all. Thomas’ answer to the question, “Do you wait for a spontaneous impulse before writing a poem?” was “No. The writing of a poem is, to me, the physical and mental task of constructing a formally watertight compartment of words,” which sounds a lot different from seeking the muse of madness. Thomas was more in line with Charles Baudelaire, who defined “Inspiration” as, “Working everyday….”
The truths of poetry were accessed not by a cudgeling of the brain via alcohol or drugs, but by sitting alone in a room, armed with a pencil. His wits were all he ever had to drive that pencil across the page. He might drink a beer or two, but his most potent stimulants were fizzy lemonade and candy – sugary concoctions to counteract a diabetic’s low blood-sugar. Thus stimulated, and thus armed, he found his way over and over into profound regions of poetic inspiration. The realm of self-destructive madness was never where he hoped to be – and when he found himself there at the end, the game was already over. He was searching not for poetic inspiration anymore, but only for a good time.
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