Starving Artists- Continued

         The Self-Destructive Artist 200 years ago and after



    The myth of the self-destructive artist and poet came out of late 18th century Britain. "Heard melodies are sweet/ But those unheard are sweeter' wrote one early Romantic poet. Yet whatever poets heard or didn't hear back then, some of them died quite young.
     John Keats, a famous English poet wrote some great poems but died of tubercolosis at he age of 25. Keats was born in 1795. He didn't live to see much of the 19th century.
     Lord Byron a bisexual poet from the British aristocracy did get out of England but he didn't live too long either. Byron, says of one  person of him, "was one of the greatest English poets." He made love to dozens of women ansd men and was a cash addict who wasted oodles of money.
     In the 1820's,George Gordon Brown went off to Greece to help the Greeks in their war of independence against their Turkish rulers. The Greeks won the war but Byron didn't live to see it. He died from a fever in Greece at the age of 36.
      Then before Byron and Keats there was Thomas Chatterton the 18th century English poet. He killed himself at the age of 28 in 1770.
     Yet writing poetry didn't always  lead to poets killing themselves or living in poverty.
     "You have lived your elaborate lie'" wrote the young Leonard Cohen. "So let us compare mythologies." Cohen like many talented poets avoided addictions, alcoholism and suicide. So did most other poets. Irving Layton who like Cohen also lived in Montreal, was a flamboyant figure who grew up really poor. Yet he ended up as a tenured professor teaching at the University of Toronto.
    Nor were these two poets exceptions. In post World war Two North America, many creative writers found jobs teaching at colleges and universities. Others took up careers in other fields and still found time to write poetry, and novels, or teach in the visual arts.. So writing poetry isn't always a dangerous task. Only one thing stands out about poetry is that like many other arts it doesn't make you much money, by itself.