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Paying the ultimate price to be a top poet
There is the Chelsea Hotel in New York where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death at the age of 39. Some shrines are more recherché, such as the Yorkshire pot hole where Louis MacNeice caught the nasty cold that led to his death from pneumonia at the age of 56.
But what about all those poets who managed to make old bones and expired in their beds with their loved ones gathered round?
Thomas Hardy was 87, William Wordsworth 80. They belonged to what Philip Larkin, who lasted until he was 66, called the ‘big, sane boys’ who lived long enough to ‘get the medals’ and enjoy the fruits of their success. Among Larkin’s healthy role models were Chaucer and Shakespeare. Deaths Of The Poets is a gripping, witty read, but also asks serious questions about the way the post-Romantic myth of the doomed, self-destructive poet skews the way we interpret their work.
If Wilfred Owen had not died at the age of 25 on the battlefield, but survived to 80 like his fellow soldier, poet Siegfried Sassoon, would we find his poetry less searing? And is it fair that Larkin’s reputation as a reactionary geriatric resulted in his work falling from favour in a more politically correct age?
In other words, say Farley and Roberts, is it not time that readers started paying less attention to how poets lived and died and renewed their attention to the words they left behind?