We Should Love Poetry — but Poets? Maybe Not

Poetry Appreciation Month is almost over and I haven’t done a thing to celebrate it, other than mention it in a column about Jazz Appreciation Month — also April — “the cruelest month,” if you can trust T.S. Eliot, which I don’t. Never did and never will.

Perhaps I should apologize to poets, but as a jazz musician and a poet, I just can’t. You see, jazz musicians are fun guys to hang out with, whereas poets … poets … are not.

Limiting ourselves to the United States and Britain, here are some of our poets — good poets — who committed suicide: John Berryman, Thomas Chatterton, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, Vachel Lindsay, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Sara Teasdale.

These poets tried to commit suicide but failed: William Cowper, Edgar Allan Poe, Laura Riding and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

These poets were confined to mental institutions: Berryman, Louise Bogan, Cowper, Eliot, Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, Anne Sexton and Christopher Smart.

Note, please, that these 20 guys and gals were all good poets — successful, at any rate, by the lamentable standards of poetic success: that is, they were published and people read them. Think of all the unsuccessful poets who … no, don’t think of them.

Our list could be extended if we include poets from Russia — where it’s practically mandatory for a poet to kill himself (Sergey Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetayeva) or try to (Afanasy Fet, Nikolai Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam) or be put in an institution (Velimir Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak), or be arrested (A History of Russian Poetry from Ancient to Modern Times.)

Poets who were troubled by severe depression include all of the above, plus William Blake, Aleksandr Blok, Rupert Brooke, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Edward FitzGerald, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Samuel Johnson, John Keats, Walter Savage Landor, Mikhail Lermontov, James Russell Lowell, Alexander Pushkin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman.

Do you catch my drift? That’s 50 of the world’s greatest poets, none of whom fit my idea of a fun guy.

All of these diagnoses are confirmed by Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of neuropsychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and author of the best book ever written on artistic creativity: “Touched with Fire — Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.”

Now, it’s true that a few great jazz musicians committed de facto suicide by the way they lived. Their stories are so well-known I need not name them. But at least they were fun guys along the way.

That’s probably because most musicians work in a band, and practice with the band, and so are forced to lead something of a social existence. Notable neurotic exceptions include pianists Vladimir Horowitz and Glenn Gould, who were, by and large, solo performers, and could hide out and practice alone — as a poet writes.

It’s this solitary existence, I think, plus an affinity for alcohol, that makes so many poets, even great ones, so much less appealing than their poems.

Take Charles Baudelaire, the greatest poet of the 19^th century, whose idea of a good time was to have his Creole mistress Jeanne Duval sit by a window so he could gaze upon her, for hours.

What a hoot that must have been for Jeanne.

I’ll admit that the greatest poet of the 20^th century, Pablo Neruda, sounds like a fun guy. After writing all morning, he’d invite friends in for an enormous lunch of fish and crustaceans, then hoist himself upstairs for a long nap. In the evening, he’d agitate against fascists.

My kind of guy.

No, I’m afraid that on our planet it seems to be a poet’s fate to spend much of his life suffering alone in a room — if he has a room — no matter what glories he leaves behind. (When the poet Alfred Jarry died, he was living in a crawlspace between two floors of a hotel.)

Humans used to be pack animals, like dogs, who still are, and are happier than humans.

Poets are loners.

So as we say farewell to Jazz and Poetry Appreciation Month, 2019, I’m glad I got a chance to be both a jazz musician and a poet — and a humble drudge: a journalist. Becoming a musician and journalist — forced to get out there in public — probably saved me from the miserable life of a poet.

Alto saxophonist Paul Desmond said it best, ruminating upon the tendency of rich society women to have a fling with a poet or musician, then marry a millionaire: “This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker.”

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