WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Poets die young -- younger than novelists, playwrights and other writers, a U.S. researcher said Wednesday.
It could be because poets are tortured and prone to self-destruction, or it could be that poets become famous young, so their early deaths are noticed, said James Kaufman of the Learning Research Institute at California State University at San Bernardino.
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"Haven't you got poet or something like that?" "Now you see the trouble with poet is how do you know it's deceased? Try the priest!"
Yeah, I've listened to too much Sweeney Todd this week. Actually, thoae lyrics just pops into my head whenever I hear the word "poet" anyway, so whatever. Carry on.
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Hmm. I tend to like poets who actually did live to a ripe old age. Frost. Milton. Stuff like that. I think you can get a lot of wisdom from old poets.
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It's also worth noting that poets make considerably less money. I wonder if they factored for that as a variable.
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It's because they've all written such perfect little poems for their gravestones and are eager to use them.
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hmm...so perhaps that faint and haunting suspicion I'll die young has some validity...and sad to say, yes I have thought about different potentials for an epitaph...
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I tend to accept death and I've seen what it does to cling to life too strongly and how that destroys people...so a poem encouraging fighting death when it is imminent tends to annoy me
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no...it isn't to the universe at all, but it states it in a universal manner...it gives no reason to struggle against death, besides that it is death, implying a universal standard that his father should follow
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It's a selfish, desperate plea. The persuasive element is not the absent corresponding reasons, but that the speaker is asking. It is a personal appeal. He isn't playing on reason or fear; he's appealing to love.
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and in his appeal to love he fails to show love for his father...he disregarded what his father may be feeling physically, emotionally, and spiritually and made himself the centre of the universe and all that matters...he is appealing to love without returning it...
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*wanders off muttering something about a hatred of angsty poetry...* *has made a vow to stop writing angst and to destroy it when I do write it, pre-this thread*
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quote:Yeah, I'm sure we'd all remember Dylan Thomas as fondly if he wrote a poem called "Hurry up and die, already."
Tom, you've really been cracking me up the past few days.
FarmGirl, you beat me to it! I haven't been posting interesting links lately, but when I saw this one I thought it would be worth posting.
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Maybe it's because poets don't usually make enough money to remain healthy, because writing poetry is a lot less likely to be met with success in life than writing.
And, of course, the ratio of wannabes to real in both fields is about 100 to 1. This means a lot of... well, it means a lot of overdrama.
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