Poets!

Hannah Sullivan, reviewing three new books about T.S. Eliott in the March 3 TLS:

English literary history provides few opportunities for generalization. In fact, on the basis of the past two or three centuries, there may be only one maxim that can be ventured with confidence: poets have bad lives. High rates of fatal illness (tuberculosis, typhoid), suicide, death by misadventure (drowning, brawling, buggy accidents, falling from bar stools) and alcoholism ensure that many are short. When they are longer – and they are almost never very long – other problems present themselves: Milton's blindness, Pound's treason and imprisonment, Auden's face. Intense sexual jealousy, broken marriages and adultery comprise one vein of misery; depression, mania, psychosis, addiction and hypochondria another. Poverty, often extreme when compared to non-poets of the same period and social class, is a grinding near-constant. Publication is much harder to achieve for poets than for almost all other kinds of writer. The one obvious positive is that the actual work – the writing of the poems – is enjoyable and, once under way, quick to do. (The agony of getting started should be added to the debit column.)

Because it so reliably provides material for poems, poets tend to have complicated relationships with the devastation around them. One mark of a great poet might even be the ability to find and describe "a new kind of unhappiness" (Thomas Wyatt's boast, 500 years ago.) T.S. Eliot's contribution was "an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction." By "aboulie" – the quotation is from a 1921 letter to Richard Aldington, written shortly before Eliot handed over the drafts of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound – he meant something like failure of the will, an inability to execute one's own intentions. His early poetry examines this state of mind forensically. . . .

Eliot himself encouraged the idea that his misery and his poetry were closely intertwined. Of his disastrous first marriage he wrote, "to Vivienne, the marriage brought no happiness . . . to me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."

Some people have thought, or maybe hoped, that since the writing of all those poems in the late 1910s and 1920s was associated with so much misery, maybe Eliot's poetic productivity later on declined because he was actually happier. But the release of letters from his later life, and the publication of a memoir by one of his close friends, shows that this was not so:

Taken together, these books dispel the idea that Eliot's middle years were an improvement on his early ones. If anything they seem to have been worse, saturated with small privations, physical discomforts and duties he found onerous.

Hypochondria was a constant theme of Eliot's middle and later life, as was an abiding hatred of the jobs he took to pay the bills. He had long, complicated, romantic but apparently not sexual relationships with at least two women but instead of marrying one of them he twice married women he barely knew and who turned out to be crazy. It's a sad tale.

If you want to be happy, stay away from poets.