Bad News for Sensitive Souls

"I've dubbed this the 'Sylvia Plath Effect,"' says the man who tells us that poets die younger than other writers.

Thankfully I am only a part-time, foul-weather poet. That should garner me a few extra years.

Could it be that they/we see the benefit in brevity? Who needs a novel when a well-turned couplet will do?

Comments

[Toby]

Or perhaps, like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean (and unlike Madonna), their best stuff is done when they are young and so they become a legend on death (I know Monroe and Dean were not much good anyway, but bear with me). Madonna, who shows no signs of dying, has been going down the tube since the Music album.

Model yourself on James Merrill - who got better with age.

[Sean]

Have you ever read any of Rupert Brooke's proems, if now, I suggest you do. They are at times very disturbing, even more so than Plath in my mind. Whilst he died like many other young men in World War I, his derision of growing old, getting married and such life is quite interesting.