Gawker
Being a poet might mean you die young. In fact, writing in general is not good for your lifespan, James Kaufman writes in his study of 1,987 authors from different cultures. Published in 2003, it's titled, "The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young." It isn't the first study to make such claims! The Education Guardian reports, "a 1975 study found that poets tended to die younger than fiction writers."
A 1995 study found that 'poets died younger than fiction writers, non-fiction writers, and people in the theatre'. A 1997 study "found that Japanese writers were more likely to die young than other eminent Japanese".[Education Guardian]
Kaufman used a statistical tool called Tukey's Honestly Significant Difference test "to determine which differences were significant in each culture, by gender, and overall".
The numbers tell the story. A poet's life, on average, is about a year shorter than that of a playwright, four years shorter than a novelist's life, and five-and-six-tenths years less than that of a non-fiction specialist.
Kaufman's study ends, as do the lives of many poets, on a sad note. He writes: "The fact that a Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton may die young does not necessarily mean an introduction to poetry class should carry a warning that poems may be hazardous to one's health. Yet this study may reinforce the idea of poets being surrounded by an aura of doom, even compared with others who may pick up a pen and paper for other purposes. It is hoped that the data presented here will help poets and mental-health professionals find ways to lessen what appears to be a sometimes negative impact of writing poetry on mortality and mental health."
Comments
This is not surprising at all, considering how stabby poets make me feel.
Oh, my God, the biggest goosebump movie moment of my life was when those boys stood up on those desks at the end of DPS. I mean, I was like 13 at the time and hoped that the jocks in my grade would suddenly have a turnaround and invite me to their cave for poetry readings and whiskey.
Thank God I just write fiction!
This survey is so confuddled that it's no wonder Mishima took himself out.
There once was a poet from Canarsie
Who caught a dreadful case of the palsy
He trembled at night
And looked such a fright
And now he is pushing up daisies
Fluers du Malnutrition.
More or less dangerous than Kurtwood Smith driving you to suicide for wanting to be an actor?
Here's a fun and instructive experiment:
The next time you're in a bookstore or library, take a gander at the "complete works" compilations of a few American poets. Notice the size of these books.
Next, saunter over to the fiction and, as best you can, get a feel for the "complete works" of a few not-especially-prolific American writers. Joan Didion, for example. Notice the number and size of these books.
What do we discover?
Poets have an incredible amount of time on their hands!
Over the course of a career, fiction writers compose many, many hundreds more pages of text than do poets.
Is it any wonder that American poets have traditionally needed a twenty-four hour shuttle service to various "clinics" and other assorted loony bins?
I'm not saying that I don't love those guys and value their work. But this country really needs to marshal its resources and put together some sort of national program that will help poets constructively fill the countless hours they'd normally spend alone in a room, staring blankly at the mid-distance, listening to the voices telling them that it's time to drink a lot of cheap vodka and start shaving off that nasty build-up of skin on their wrists.
I remember a student saying to me I was "really fit for a writer" and I thought it was this whole other thing. You know. And now I can see it was more like this, or...
..actually maybe not.
I've written a shit-load of pretty decent poetry in my time, and I'm a fucking wreck.
There should be health warnings on every rhyming dictionary, and rhymezone.com should be blocked by netnanny etc.
I mean - physically, I'm not bad. But mentally? Sheesh.
It all has to do with the income.
Who bothers to fund these studies? The Center for Long-Lived Failed Novelists?
Speaking On Behalf of All Poets, most of us are too busy fiddling with line breaks or reading Gawker to worry about our early deaths.
So does this mean that if she hadn't written The Bell Jar, Plath would have died even younger?
@slackerina: I second that. Here's to Gawker from distracting us from an untimely death.
that being said, does anyone want to buy a copy of my chapbook?
All writers are assholes.
So the life of a lyric poet is 5.6 years shorter than that of "a non-fiction specialist," a phrase presumably coined by a journalist or other non-fiction specialist. But then the poet gets immortality, whereas the journalist gets daily shame throughout life, followed by eternal oblivion.
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