Starving Artists- Continuation of previous story on poetry. Part Nine Continued

    Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health and Your Life


   Being a poet isn't sometimes just  a road to poverty. It can also lead to an early death. Gwendolyn MacEwen grew up in Toronto. She was three years younger than Margaret Atwood. MacEwen was a good poet too. In the 1950's and 1960's she and Margaret Atwood were great friends.
    Yet MacEwen's literary career just didn't take off like Atwood's. She was an alcoholic and died in 1987.
    Sylvia Plath became a poster child of the doomed feminist woman poet. Plath was a Boston-born prodigy who wrote poetry, short stories and novels. Her semi-autobiographical novel 'The Bell Jar' came out in the early 1960's. A short time later this gifted woman killed herself in London, England.
    Plath belongs to the haunted generation who came of age in the 1930's and after. One of her contemporaries, Anne Sexton was another gifted poet who committed suicide. She died in the 1970's.
     Male poets of this era didn't all get off easily either. John Berryman was another great American poet. "He was one of the founders of the confessional school of poetry," said one critic about Berryman. Berryman had his problems. His demons stopped haunting him in 1974 when he killed himself.
     Randall Jarrell another fine poet of mid-20th century America did himself in in 1966.
     Some U.S. male poets survived but just barely. Theodore Roethke drank lots of alcohol and had bouts of mental illness.He died at the age of 55. "The greenhouse," wrote Roethke , "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." Maybe Roethke never found that greenhouse on this earth.
     Robert Lowell trod down the same path as Roethke though he lived longer. Lowell was an upper class Boston Brahmin who had many bouts of mental illness. He spent some time in mental hospitals. He died in 1977 at the age of 70. Helen Vendler, a critic called Lowell's 1960 book 'Life Studies', "Lowell's most original book." It was acclaimed by many as a poetic masterpiece.
    For some poets in 20th century North America, life was a tough road to go down. Yet this wasn't  the first time that poets had faced mental and physical problems.