Deaths of the Poets
Author: Roberts, Michael Symmons
ISBN: 9780099581321
Publisher: VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET
Year First Published: 2018
Pages: 432
Dimensions: 197mm x 130mm x 31mm
Format: Paperback / softback
Description
An entertaining journey into how the deaths of great poets have shaped our culture's distorted sense of poetry
From Dylan Thomas's eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath's desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton's Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats' death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work.
The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just an illusion , or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry?
In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.
ISBN: 9780099581321
Publisher: VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET
Year First Published: 2018
Pages: 432
Dimensions: 197mm x 130mm x 31mm
Format: Paperback / softback
Description
An entertaining journey into how the deaths of great poets have shaped our culture's distorted sense of poetry
From Dylan Thomas's eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath's desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton's Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats' death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work.
The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just an illusion , or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry?
In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.
