The phrase “a writer's life” calls up all kinds of woebegone and absinthe-addled ghosts and is often affixed to a colon when it appears in the titles of biographies—a glut of them in recent years. Below is an exhaustive (to my knowledge) list:
- Lives of the English Poets - Samuel Johnson (1781)
- A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World - Harriet Monroe (1938)
- Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet - Alice Curtayne (1972)
- W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet - Charles Osborne (1979)
- Lives of the Modern Poets - William H. Pritchard (1980)
- Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life - Lyndall Gordon (1984)
- Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life - Andrew Motion (1993)
- Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life - Jan Marsh (1994)
- Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke - Ralph Freedman (1996)
- A.C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life - Rikky Rooksby (1997)
- Lives of the Poets - Michael Schmidt (1998)
- Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet - Elaine Feinstein (2001)
- The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets - Michael Schmidt (2004)
- e.e. cummings: A Poet’s Life - Catherine Reef (2006)
- Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life - Scott Donaldson (2007)
- Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War - Harry Ricketts (2010)
- Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life - Margot Peters (2011)
- Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life - Dana Greene (2012)
- Late Romance: Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life - David Yezzi (2023)
- And Then? And Then? What Else?: A Writer’s Life - Daniel Handler (2024)
I have read all of these admirable books, or at least most of most of them. I noticed many commonalities between the writers’ lives, and between their lives and my own. Some were reassuring; others seemed like gentle warnings, hints, and prophecies. In the spirit of knowledge-sharing or consolation, fellow-feeling or, in several cases, whistle-blowing and the dismantling of unhelpful myths, I collate below some quotations from these books, grafted together in an order something like a timeline, interspersed with my own observations. (Of course, there's more compelling detail in these books than I could ever put in quotes, and I encourage you to take a closer look.) The effects of luck and prejudice on publication have made for a less diverse arrangement than I’d like; I will try to make up for that between quotations.
“Talking like a professor of geology”: On the beginnings of vocation
To begin at the beginning: vocation is a necessary concept, for the shove it gives us out of thought and into productivity, but it is supersubstantial and fussily personal. John Keats said poetry should come as easily as leaves to a tree, or not at all; Rilke said you have to look inside yourself and ask “Must I write?” Not everyone who'd answer “Yes” is well known now, but everyone who's well known now would answer “Yes.”
Furtively, Denny Levertov dug out the poems she had stashed between sofa cushions and sent them off to T. S. Eliot, editor of the Criterion . . . It was 1936, and she was only twelve, but desire and embryonic talent had already coalesced in a ‘secret destiny.’ [Greene on Levertov]
It was decided at an early age that Virginia was to be a writer. Writing absorbed her, she said, ‘ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St Ives while the grown-ups dined.’ [Gordon on Woolf]
As a child he already showed a passion for words—the longer they were the better—and he used to appal his aunts ‘by talking like a professor of geology.’ [Osborne on Auden]
The book that Hecht first lit on was a collection of nursery rhymes . . . One verse in particular—a common mishearing of the old Scottish folksong ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean’ [as ‘my body’] —fascinated him . . . He later remembered ‘brooding upon these lines, like darkness upon the face of the waters.’ [Yezzi on Hecht]
As [Dante] Gabriel [Rossetti] recalled, there came a ‘memorable Sunday afternoon’ when Maria pronounced a poem of Christina's to be so good that ‘she would be the poet in the family.’ Thus, somewhere around her twelfth birthday, her vocation was established. [Marsh on Rossetti]
My mother went out and bought a whole library—second hand—of classic poets . . . so, I was in that cooker from the age of about eleven—totally confident that I belonged in it, so by sixteen I had no thought of becoming anything but a writer of some kind, certainly writing verse. [Hughes, as quoted by Feinstein]
Grandfather Gottlieb advised her to learn a trade; Henry wanted her to work in a bank. But Lorine had one calling and pursued it. She wrote poetry and she read it . . . Her copy of Selections from Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley was her bible, with hundreds of notations. [Peters on Niedecker]
High in the mountains of Greece a perilous road leads to Delphi, the sacred center of the world, the place where heaven and earth meet. There in 1961 Denise Levertov took her ‘final vows’ to poetry at the shrine of Apollo, praying that the flame of the poem be kept alive in her. Although she became violently ill when she drank water from a nearby brackish spring, she nonetheless sang and danced . . . She was thirty-eight, and the power of poetry played in her. Her vocation was irrevocable. [Greene on Levertov]
I had a comparable experience. In 2022, I took a boat from tourist-flooded Mykonos to Delos, to the Sacred Lake where Apollo and his sister had been born. Approaching the site of the miracle, I soliloquized internally about my path, imagining I’d dip my feet in the acclaiming waters and pretend to a new significance. Alas: the lake had been drained to suppress the spread of malaria-bearing mosquitoes. I stood in the dust of the sacred, instead, and then went on my way.
Of course, not everybody likes to say they have a calling. Some of us find other words for what we feel we have to do.
Many writers refer to what they do as a calling, which never sounds right to me. It’s too grandiose, too literary . . . I got to interview the writer Rachel Ingalls, perhaps my absolute favourite writer, at what turned out to be very near the end of her life. She referred to what she did as a compulsion . . . I can’t really stop and I don’t really want to. [Handler]
“Those frilled and corseted days”: On choosing writing as a woman
Choosing writing as a woman, or being chosen by it or compelled to do it, has specific difficulties and entails specific sacrifices; or, to frame that differently, it can offer certain freedoms and alternatives.
In late 1961, shortly after having returned from Delphi, [Levertov] recorded this entry in her diary: One feeling I have sometimes is a sort of grim resignation, i.e., Oh well, if I can't satisfy or be satisfied in my marriage I will give myself to that in which I can give and receive satisfaction—not ‘the literary life’ in the busy-busy sense but ‘the life of the mind’ and the life of the creative imagination . . . Instead of moping I feel like plunging doggedly into those areas where things do work for me. [Greene on Levertov]
Among its other elements, Maud [by Alfred Tennyson] articulates the choices available to girls like Christina . . . Her dilemma—how to reconcile feminine docility with desire for excellence and fame, or to find a role that combined piety, poetry and love—is resolved only by Maud’s melodramatic death, as if to say literary ambition is incompatible with female fulfillment. [Marsh on Rossetti]
Historically, women writers have been pushed—or even forced—to focus on their lives, or the lives of others, above their work. With a room of one’s own comes guilt provoked by barrages of questions. Men don’t tend to worry in this way because the value of their work—their place as artists—is assumed or presumed. Which is not to say there are no ways to countervail presumption.
During her twenty-year apprenticeship she had to take in her father’s precepts and then move beyond them, seeking a model in her own mind. She had, too, to liberate herself as a woman from Victorian habits of self-deprecation. [Gordon on Woolf]
I practiced writing fitfully and with some difficulty, felt abused if I had to help with the housework, or the sewing (nothing came ready-made in those frilled and corseted days), and rather expected the masculine world to fall at my feet . . . My dreams of fame kept me from becoming preoccupied with those dreams of love which underlie the self-absorption of so many young girls . . . The love sequence would come, of course … but it must be initiated by a grand passion, for I could accept no compromise . . . My career was to be rich and all-embracing, a lofty destiny with every high emotion in it! [Monroe]
We shouldn't forget that some women can’t find a room of their own but manage to make art anyway. In a paper delivered at Amherst College in 1980, Audre Lorde noted that “Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper . . . Poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.” In which direction your vocation moves may be decided less by inclination than necessity—but move it will.
“Merely a symptom of youthful onanistic egoism”: On hating your own work
As confident as many of these tyro scribes seem, they too participate in the tradition of despising your own work—often with gusto. The novels I wrote in my adolescence will stay in my adolescence; 90 percent of what I've written recently remains in utero/notebook, gratefully unacknowledged. Likewise:
Virginia Stephen’s initial efforts at creative writing were, predictably, overwhelmed by the bright fruits of art and knowledge. She was intimidated by the achievements of Austen, Meredith and Hardy, and dared not write with the mind until she perfected her eye. Her Hyde Park Gate diary (1903) and her travel diary (1906–9) were filled with high-flown descriptive exercises. [Gordon on Woolf]
When term was over and he had returned to Coten End [Larkin] told Sutton that his worries about the war had merely given way to worries about his future as a writer: I am extremely miserable about my writing. As you know, I am continually examining myself for signs of literary ability. This in itself is a bad thing . . . (1) I want to be ‘a writer.’ (2) The kind of writing (scribbled scratchy nonsense) I have perpetrated up till now has been entirely derivative and imitative. (3) There has been in it no ‘unknown quality’ such as abounds in Lawrence and all writers worth admiring. (4) It is merely a symptom of youthful onanistic egoism, of which there are far too many examples. [Motion on Larkin]
Often to the neglect of his schoolwork, Win wrote many sonnets and short poems during his high school years. When he tried them out on his friends, sitting around a hot stove on a chilly afternoon, the friends decided to be unimpressed, and Robinson threw his efforts into the fire. [Donaldson on Robinson]
Wystan at school was fiercely self-critical, and one summer morning in 1924 he announced to [his friend] Pudney that, bad though Pudney’s poems were, his, Auden's, were even worse, for they were more pretentious . . . As we approached the larger of the school ponds, I was commanded to stand back while the poet, tossing back his pale straight hair, drew his manuscripts from his pockets and went on along, to commit literary suicide by casting them into the depths . . . Wystan laughingly announced to his shivering disciple that he had now got poetry out of his system and intended to devote his life to science. But later that same day the ex-poet appeared at Pudney’s study window in the damp twilight, beckoning him again to the woods . . . to witness . . . the poet’s attempt to retrieve his poems. [Osborne on Auden]
“Burning my candle at 3 ends”: On making a living
The writer, once committed to the work, is then committed to sustaining it with other kinds of work. Teaching is a common option (even Shakespeare was ostensibly a schoolmaster). I’ve had a lot of teaching roles, in schools and universities, and have enjoyed that work because it justifies my taking on endeavours like this lecture. If you write to find out what you think, you teach to find out what you know—and what you don't know. It’s absorbing work, however, and it leads at times to crises of overabsorption—or what look like crises at the time.
He accepted the post [the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard] . . . but he fretted about the lectures. What on earth would he say? ‘Lecturing is presumably a form of teaching; and presumably a teacher is somebody who knows,’ he said. ‘I never did, and still don't, know. What has always fascinated me is not teaching, but learning.’ [Reef on Cummings]
In several letters . . . Ted describes his difficulties in mustering sufficient concentration to write anything, when so much of his psychic energy was being stolen by his students: ‘This teaching of mine is death. I have a lot of ideas—more than I could use if I had all day, and it is the best season of the year.’ Yet many of the poems that were to go into Lupercal were being published in 1958 and they were Hughes’s finest work to date. [Feinstein on Hughes]
It’s a short walk from Grub Street to Fleet Street. Journalism was and is a useful way for a writer to train their own critical eye. It’s a way to keep up with changes and develop a feeling for the broader context in which literary moments, movements and non-starters play out and become played out. Done frequently and broadly, it’s a way to liberate oneself from trendiness. When I began a week of work experience at the Times Literary Supplement ten years ago, I saw immediately what it meant to be involved—to both participate in and be intertwined with something larger.
At times the amount of [journalistic and critical] work [Edward Thomas] took on suggests both a desire to displace other anxieties and some perverse need to test himself beyond his limits. He called this ‘burning my candle at 3 ends.’ He broke down on a number of occasions but he never quite fell apart. [Ricketts on war poets]
The year 1936 was an especially busy and productive one for Auden. In a book review he wrote for the April-May issue of New Verse, he said he could not believe ‘that any artist can be any good who is not more than a bit of a reporting journalist.’ Throughout his working life, Auden continued to maintain that the artist could only benefit from involvement in journalism, though he understood quite clearly that too deep an involvement could dull the sensibilities. [Osborne on Auden]
Not all jobs are so beneficial. I've held roles as a barista in a service station, a university librarian, and a salesperson in a school uniform shop. Wanda Coleman, not to be bettered, was at certain points an actress, a Peace Corps recruiter, and an editor at a softcore porn magazine. But no experience is wasted on the work—or on the life.
Especially from Works and Days a sense emerges of a man with a past, an immigrant father, a litigious layabout brother, a farm, and a farmer’s seasonal woes. He is keen to make understanding out of what he knows. [Schmidt on Hesiod]
In a letter to one of his correspondents . . . Stevens confided that ‘I try to draw a definite line between poetry and business,’ and that he didn’t want his Hartford [Accident and Indemnity Company] friends to know about his poetry, because ‘once they know they never think of you as anything but a poet and, after all, one is inevitably much more complicated than that.’ [Pritchard on Stevens]
“He must work ... like an artist”: On patience
Amid the extraneous employment and localized frustrations, some writers are tempted by speedy publication. But the best advice I've had, from Paul Muldoon, is: “Take your time.” The quality we call virality—immediate but brief, slipshod and changeable—is not your friend. T. S. Eliot released new work only rarely; by this, he made every published poem an event.
There was in [Woolf], as in the most original of her contemporaries, T. S. Eliot, restraint. Both submitted themselves to years of silent practice; both hoarded writings without attempting publication. Patience is not a literary virtue much spoken of nowadays but they had it, a sign not of humility but of vigilant self-respect. [Gordon on Woolf]
Elizabeth Barrett had sent an aspiring poet some words that would have been useful to Christina at this point, commending ‘the labour and discipline without which no artist can excel before seeking publication: I do not say—she would be a happier woman if she did not try it . . . because my words would probably be said in vain . . . But I take courage . . . to advise her to think more, to read more, and dream somewhat less . . . to study hard our English poets, and even prose writers of the graver reasoning order, to write with compression and concentration of meaning (and more thoughts in proportion to the sentiments) . . . It is a mistake to think that a true poet (whatever his gifts!) can sing like a bird, he must work on the contrary like an artist. [Marsh on Rossetti]
His repetitive emphasis on Rodin's belief in the artist’s sacred and unchanging duty toward work turned into a litany of his own agenda . . . He noted how both his masters, Tolstoy and Rodin, seemed to deny life’s amenities to accommodate their art: hence Tolstoy’s unhappy household and Rodin’s uncomfortable home . . . The artist’s principal obligation remains work, ‘only work,’ with great patience. [Freedman on Rilke]
“Like taking a cork out a bottle”: On chaos
Progress never comes without some friction: true by definition. For you, as for me, there will be evictions and imploded relationships, confidence-eroding periods of unemployment, deaths and other exits, pandemics, and so on. Like anyone else, writers try to avoid or alleviate these episodes, but can never quite succeed.
Ted confided [to a friend] that the confusion about where he was living—and, although he doesn't mention it, with whom—was making it almost impossible to write: “All I've been interested in is simplifying my existence so I can write, and all I've ever done is involve myself with other people so that now I can’t move without terrible consequences on all sides.” [Feinstein on Hughes]
In order to write without distractions, he pitched a tent on a point of land that was reached most easily by canoe, and lived there alone. In the evening, he paddled across the lake to join his family for dinner and collect the next day’s provisions. He wrote slowly, making ‘every paragraph a thing which seemed good to me.’ [Reef on Cummings]
The interruption caused by the war had made concentration so difficult that he could not retrieve it without solitude in the most literal sense . . . He even refused a dog; caring for anything outside himself would interfere with his need for absolute concentration. [Freedman on Rilke]
There are always wars and other patterns of embattlement. Where duties and disruptions on such grander scales come in, integration seems the only adequate response.
The war, too, heightened his sense of responsibility to the county administration work in which he had become involved. He discussed his problems with [Lord] Dunsany, who, faithful to his belief that ‘poetry is a sacred art,’ advised him to continue writing whatever happened. [Curtayne on Ledwidge]
To become a post-war artist, Virginia Woolf had to come to terms with the First World War, and she did so in a strange way. She devised a counter-history in which war is not the centre-piece but a vacant period through which time rushes. [Gordon on Woolf]
Some writers manage to sift the whirlpool, finding in it things to write about.
Before he left Oxford, Larkin had decided that if he was going to write anything good, he would only do it by living quietly. The next three years proved him wrong. It was a time of great turmoil for him, in which he wrote faster and better than before. ‘As far as my writing was concerned,’ he said later, ‘leaving Oxford was like taking a cork out of a bottle. Writing flooded out of me.’ [Motion on Larkin]
“The canonical hour of the crucifixion”: On patterns of work
Sometimes too much comfort, a vacuity of stillness, or a flab of time, makes working strangely difficult.
When Teddy Roosevelt provided Robinson with a sinecure at the New York Custom House from 1905 to 1909, it was almost as if the free house prevented him from getting poems written. ‘Work with me,’ he said at the time, ‘means studying the ceiling and my navel for four hours and then writing down perhaps four lines—sometimes seven and then again none at all.’ [Donaldson on Robinson]
The important thing is to figure out your own way of working. For me, it has to be a few hours in the morning. Similarly, Woolf would take her time with breakfast and then write for three to four hours, every day. But for Hunter S. Thompson, working meant a maelstrom of Chivas and Dunhill, cannabis, cocaine, and LSD from 3pm to midnight, when he would begin to write; and for Haruki Murakami, work demands a six-hour block of writing, 4am–10am, and then a few hours’ running and swimming. The method—which describes in miniature the writer’s attitude to work and how it fits into their life—is as idiosyncratic as the work itself.
Auden told Hecht, that summer [in 1950], that he had never been able to work after three in the afternoon, but that it was only after his adult acceptance of the Christian faith that he understood the reason for the sense of indolence, loss and depression that came over him at that time: it was the canonical hour of the Crucifixion. [Osborne on Auden]
It is good to write every day—even if only a line, a seemingly fatuous observation; even if you’re only adding phrases to your notebook or your Notes app. Inchoate things—and habits—have a way of starting to cohere.
All my books are like this, corralled together from things I've been mulling over for years . . . Little bits from all over the place, mostly literature—scurry into my mind and I scurry after them. [Handler]
All their mornings . . . were dedicated to writing. In a letter to her mother, Sylvia [Plath] describes her joy at living with someone as committed to work as she was. [Feinstein on Hughes]
Only writing, Virginia Woolf said, could compose ‘the synthesis of my being.’ She wrote every day for about thirty-five years. [Gordon on Woolf]
“Two copies were sold in the first year”: On early disappointments
Along with being interrupted, you will be rejected, by editors or by conspiracies of readers. Succour may be taken from the fact that it was thus for everyone: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Agatha Christie, James Baldwin, Anne Frank. These writers would be unknown if they or those who championed their work had stopped when first rejected.
Blackwood’s duly consigned the poems to the wastepaper basket . . . Like writers before and since, she was hurt by the rejection, but determined to try again, and three months later made an approach to Fraser’s . . . When Fraser’s also turned them down, however, she was sufficiently discouraged to abandon the attempt. [Marsh on Rossetti]
He eagerly submitted the poetry to publishers, but one after another told him no thanks . . . During the Depression, hardly anyone was buying books, especially books of poetry. In the first half of 1934, Covici-Friede sold not a single copy of Eimi. [Reef on Cummings]
They came home in 1843 and three years later, published Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, of which two copies were sold in the first year. The names were chosen to neutralize their genders in the public world. The critical and commercial failure of the verse impelled all three young women into fiction. [Schmidt on the Brontë sisters]
In 2015, I submitted a pamphlet of poems to the Faber New Poets scheme, and it wasn't shortlisted. In 2024, that same pamphlet appeared in my first full book, which is published in the UK by Faber and Faber. One rejection doesn’t lead to more, but one acceptance might lead anywhere at all. I expect, incidentally, many more rejections in the years to come. That never stops. If it did, I would find that preposterous.
"No indoor terlit": On finances
Poets, in particular, will be reduced to publishing their work without a fee when starting out. Most writers will be impecunious (with or without their additional jobs). For graceful flexibility and self-admonishing commitment, it is likely you’ll get little in return. I’ve lived in some obstructive circumstances and in some dives—mold up the walls, rats in the yard, a borderline sentient fungus in the shower-room, and, at one point, someone’s son subsisting in the garden shed; and I’ve been on the dole, twice. In the UK at present, the median income for a freelance writer is £7,000 a year (approximately $9,200). In the US, things are broadly similar.
Financially . . . it was a dismal autumn. He lived on the family subsidy, past royalties, small sums received for printings of a few poems in newspapers and magazines, and occasional presents. At this point there was no regular income from art criticism and reviews . . . Rilke was again faced with the perennial burden of the freelance artist, and of one who was particularly improvident. [Freedman on Rilke]
As I reached my fortieth year and entered, with the hopeful world, the new century, the professional outlook was rather discouraging. Nobody seemed to want very much what I could do; there was no certainty or permanence in any employment, and always, for anything I offered or any job I secured, there was very meager pay. [Monroe]
This may require you to think, again, about additional employment.
To have published a book at age twenty-three was a considerable achievement, but Levertov knew she could not pay her way as a poet. After the war she took a series of dead-end jobs, first in an antique store owned by the father of her friend Betty Mitchell, and then in a book shop where she was incapable of making correct change. [Greene on Levertov]
You can see why it’s a good idea to have integrity about the kind of writing work you want to do, so that its value’s always more than monetary. Despite living at one point in a cabin with “no indoor terlit,” one poet loved the work so much she let the thought of money go completely.
‘Dear Miss Monroe,’ she wrote November 5 1931, ‘Mr Zukovsky encourages me to send some of my poems to you.’ Harriet Monroe . . . accepted one. Lorine replied: I am very much in need of money but I understand that “Poetry Magazine” has also that need. I suggest you keep whatever will be coming to me for my poem “When Ecstasy Is Inconvenient” merely sending me two copies of the issue in which the poem will appear. Very truly yours, Lorine Niedecker [Peters on Niedecker]
“Jolted by a violent nosebleed”: On success
Continuing with that in mind, you may engender, or encounter, something like success.
Personally, he was at loose ends: an itinerant professor-poet, single, and, though widely acknowledged by his peers, relatively unsung. But everything in his life was about to change . . . For the first time in his life, under intense emotional strain, Hecht wrote poems of ‘absolute raw simplicity and directness’ . . . The Hard Hours won the Pulitzer Prize for 1968. [Yezzi on Hecht]
Collected Poems did what Cap Pearce hoped it would do: it brought together a large number of Cummings’s poems and established their author as an important poet. ‘With all its failures and beauties, its clashing styles, its brainsmashing complexities and moving simplicities, this is the poetry of a man of complete artistic integrity,’ commented a critic in the Saturday Review of Literature. [Reef on Cummings]
Sales of [High Windows] were exceptional. The first impression of 6,000 copies disappeared within three months of publication . . . Larkin had been given two more honorary degrees . . . seen his name in the papers incessantly, struggled through a flood of letters from admirers, and collected enough evidence to know that the national bosom returned an echo to his work as surely as it did to [John] Betjeman’s. [Motion on Larkin]
By the time Poetry was four years old I was beginning to feel like that goblin in the quaint old myth who, blowing the fog out of his face, started a tornado which went careening around the world. [Monroe]
When that success might come “careening” through, and in what company and attitude, is well beyond your management.
On his first evening [in Vienna] he gave a reading in [Hugo] Heller’s bookshop . . . A brief interlude threatened to mar the occasion. Just as he started reading, Rilke was jolted by a violent nosebleed, possibly brought on by the strain of traveling. But the bleeding stopped after he had briefly withdrawn to the washroom . . . The evening marked the beginning of Rilke’s stardom. With a black cloak flung about his shoulders, he looked both distinguished and strangely aesthetic. People crowded around him after the reading to shake his hand. Later, his hotel room was filled with people wishing to exchange a few words . . . There were congratulatory telegrams. [Freedman on Rilke]
“The greatest Lesbian poet since Sappho”: On how to behave at parties
With success come opportunities, and with those, responsibilities. The literary party or symposium—a rattle bag of cliques and sensibilities—can offer some of everything. You might, like Maya Angelou, be invited to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings off the back of a party interaction. You might, like Norman Mailer, punch Gore Vidal to the floor (Vidal: “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer”). Remember that the writer’s nightlife might get written down.
On at least one public occasion Frost invited a listener who asked him whether he was ever confused to play a game with him called ‘Confusion.’ He directed the person to ask him whether he (Frost) was confused; the person did so, whereupon Frost answered ‘No.’ He then asked whether the questioner was confused. ‘Yes,’ replied the sincere person, and Frost shot back—‘You lose.’ [Pritchard on Frost]
Auden was in good spirits at Stravinsky’s dinner party despite, or perhaps because of, having drunk ‘a jug of Gibsons before, a bottle of Champagne during, a bottle (sic) of Cherry Heering (did he think it was Chianti?) after dinner.’ He trotted out several of his party pieces, among them . . . his descriptions of Rilke as ‘the greatest Lesbian poet since Sappho’ and of Yevtushenko as ‘the poor man's Howl.’ [Osborne on Auden]
“A kind of seventh heaven”: On drinking
Not all drunks are funny, and writers will only put up with a self-styled “doomed” companion for so long, especially as boozing tends to ruin your ability to do good work long-term. Yet the link between writing and drinking remains tight (if never umbilical), as Olivia Laing’s Echo Spring (2013) suggests. “I was beginning to think that drinking might be a way of disappearing from the world, or at least slipping one's appointed place within it,” she writes. Writing too can take us out of our appointed place; but when writing becomes the writer’s entire life, it too may need escaping.
The 1860s furnish innumerable accounts of Swinburne’s disgraceful behaviour, snatching at bottles ‘like a mongoose,’ ‘belching out blasphemy and bawdry and prostrated by drink’; in the 1870s, as his health gave way, his letters are full of ‘prostration,’ ‘influenza’ and ‘seediness,’ but he was incapable of admitting the cause, blaming one bout of sickness outrageously on the ‘perfume of Indian lilies in a close bedroom.’ [Rooksby on Swinburne]
[One of] Crane’s most often-quoted . . . letters is one written to [Gorham] Munson in which he reports himself ‘notoriously drunk,’ with Ravel’s Bolero playing away on the Victrola. He tells Munson about the ‘thrilling experience’ he had last winter at the dentist’s ‘When under the influence of aether and amnesia my mind spiraled to a kind of seventh heaven of consciousness and egoistic dance among the seven spheres—and something like an objective voice kept saying to me— “You have the higher consciousness—you have the higher consciousness.”’ [Pritchard on Hart Crane]
Deaths of the Poets
The “doomed” writer archetype is misleading anyway. There is no proper ending or finale. Writers tend toward extremities and psychic turbulence, perhaps, resulting from such sensitive, continuous attention to the world, and so their lives (especially in autobiographical renditions) can read as extreme. But they leave the world, like other people, in myriad absurd or ordinary ways. Only a few of those are truly self-inflicted. See for evidence the incomplete list below, compiled from Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts's Deaths of the Poets (2017).
- W. H. Auden - “the caning he gave his heart, lungs and liver”
- Roland Barthes - laundry truck
- John Berryman - jumped off Washington Avenue Bridge
- Thomas Chatterton - laudanum overdose
- William Congreve - carriage crash, en route to Bath to recover from gout
- Emily Dickinson - kidney disease
- Robert Frost - pulmonary embolism
- George Gordon, Lord Byron - marsh fever and leeches
- Thom Gunn - acute polysubstance abuse
- John Keats - tuberculosis
- Philip Larkin - cancer
- Robert Lowell - heart attack
- Marianne Moore - stroke, after throwing a baseball out to start the Yankees’ season
- Frank O’Hara - beach buggy
- Wilfred Owen - machine-gun (First World War)
- Sylvia Plath - gas poisoning (oven)
- John Riley - murder
- Delmore Schwartz - years of alcohol, barbiturates, and amphetamines
- Anne Sexton - gas poisoning (car exhaust)
- Percy Bysshe Shelley - drowned in a storm while sailing his boat, the Don Juan
- Dylan Thomas - “eighteen straight whiskies”
“Every one a bull's-eye?”: On loss of reputation
Comorbid with the “doomed” concept is the thought that it’s a grand idea to die before you age too much—a notion informed by the West’s fascination with youth as intrinsically good. Granted, reputations rise and fall, but the longer you live, obdurately making work, the greater the chance you'll make something that endures.
Sassoon’s anxieties about his poetry persisted till the end. An honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1965 did little to diminish his acute disappointment at not receiving the Order of Merit when T. S. Eliot's death the same year created a vacancy. Even on his own death-bed, from inoperable cancer, in late August 1967, he was still desperately looking for poetic reassurance. ‘My poems; they were all right, weren't they?’ he asked Rupert Hart-Davis, his literary executor. To which Hart-Davis replied: ‘Yes, Sieg, more than all right.’ ‘Every one a bull's-eye?’ Sassoon pressed. ‘No, Sieg,’ Hart-Davis felt obliged to reply, ‘not every one.’ At which Sassoon regained his sense of humour and laughed. [Ricketts on war poets]
The fact was that, by the mid-1930s, Sassoon had become a poetic back-number. This was the decade of Auden, MacNeice, Spender and Day-Lewis—MacSpaunday, as the poet Roy Campbell wittily called them. [Ricketts on war poets]
And it will always turn again.
The return to Oxford [in 1972] was not a success. [Auden] was lonely in his sixteenth-century cottage, and though at four in the afternoon he dutifully shuffled along in his carpet slippers to St Aldate’s coffee house . . . as often as not no students came to sit with him. [Osborne on Auden]
But there are means of making strain a virtue.
In the autumn of 1962, travelling from New York to New Haven by train to lecture at Yale University, he sat in the club car and was eyed furtively for some time by two Yale students who finally sent a note to him which read, ‘We can't stand it a minute longer: Are you Carl Sandburg?’ Auden sent a note in reply: ‘You have spoiled mother’s day.’ [Osborne on Auden]
There are also writers whose “writers’ lives” were deferred, who might be deemed “late bloomers.” Toni Morrison released her debut novel at forty; George Eliot only began to write in her late thirties; Stevens started publishing his poems in his late thirties and early forties. All timelines (this one included) offer guidelines, never lineages or rules.
“I am a genius”: On losing yourself
There is the possibility of losing motivation or material if you’re propelled, later in life especially, beyond the circumstances in which you produced your most compelling work, perhaps by turning unexpectedly successful, or simply by accomplishing the thing you first set out to do.
A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own luster. [Johnson on Dryden]
There were obvious advantages: because Larkin knew that his gifts had been recognized (‘I am a genius’), he felt justified in seeking to perfect the work rather than the life. But there were drawbacks, too. Fame endangered his poems by threatening the delicate balance between a desire for private rumination and a longing for a public hearing. He wondered how he could continue to ‘be himself’ if his self depended on remoteness and disappointment, neither of which he could truly be said to possess anymore. [Motion on Larkin]
Despite the conclusion of his major work, Rilke’s confidence in his future was ebbing . . . His remark to the Kippenbergs on the occasion of their last visit that he had in effect finished his life’s work with the elegies and sonnets expressed a psychological reality that he had not yet started to overcome. [Freedman on Rilke]
“I Is Another”: On finding a new direction
For this reason, it’s important not to stick, or get stuck, in one voice or process, no matter how successful such approaches seem at first. Continue to risk something. Your reputation, even. Otherwise, the work stagnates. This is particularly true for younger authors who, if their early work is overpraised, never push beyond that style and begin to parody themselves.
It is perhaps as well for posterity that Christina’s brilliant career did not prosper as her early success might have seemed to predict, or she might then have remained in the same groove . . . As it was, she wrote with the freedom to take risks, to wait for the necessary fusion in the crucible of the imagination, without feeling that the public was waiting to read and judge each piece. [Marsh on Rossetti]
Sometimes that means you will frustrate the expectations of existing readers, who may, for a time, find it hard to forgive you.
Auden in later years would talk about having felt the need to free himself from English literary life the way one speaks of a need to break away from the suffocating embrace of parents and family. Indeed, he tended to equate the literary scene in England with a cosy parish life of gossip and inconsequence. [Osborne on Auden]
I Is Another: the phrase Arthur Rimbaud had used to describe the Seer half a century earlier described Rilke’s new quest as he began his gradual, accelerating turn toward the French language as a new instrument for his poetry . . . It meant becoming, in effect, a French poet while still retaining his place as a foremost German lyricist. Translation had become a key to this vision, and turning from German to French became an exploration of another level, another dimension, of the structure of his art. [Freedman on Rilke]
These poems should not be read as self-exculpation but as a form of self-discovery. ‘It is vital to acknowledge Hughes’s silence to himself through the intervening years,’ as Wagner points out. Hughes himself thought the poems [in Birthday Letters] ‘unpublishably raw and guarded,’ and only released them because he could not ‘bear to be blocked any longer.’ [Feinstein on Hughes]
As a poet develops, the textures [of the poems] change. Developments and changes are the life of the poet . . . But the ‘higher gossip’ of biography generally distracts readers from engaging the more fascinating story of poetic growth. [Schmidt on poets generally]
“One's poems are what one does”: On the life's work
Biography without attention to a writer’s work is at best taxonomy and at worst a form of taxidermy, leaving out the thing that gave the writer their special animating spark. So too is “poetic growth” impossible without development in life.
Levertov herself belied this Solomonic choice between life and art. For her the interaction between the two was continuous. As she attested: ‘Both life and poetry fade, wilt, shrink, when they are divorced.’ It was from life itself that her art emerged. ‘I have always . . . written out of my own experience . . . If one is what one eats, one’s poems are what one does.’ [Greene on Levertov]
Early in 1859 she became a voluntary worker at the St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, supervising young prostitutes who wished to relinquish a life of shame. Owing to work at Highgate, Christina wrote relatively little verse during the first half of 1859. But on 27 April . . . she completed her longest composition to date and eventually her most famous work. She called it ‘A Peep at the Goblins.’ This was directly inspired by the work of the Penitentiary, though its composition also included many other autobiographical elements. [Marsh on Rossetti]
‘It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw,’ she told herself. ‘One must get out of life . . . ’ After too much society, she would rock herself back into literature primarily through exercise in the open air and then by reading. Her working life established itself upon this act of oscillation. [Gordon on Woolf]
The popular understanding had it that Williams was the poet who knew life, who experienced real people; the physician who witnessed real births and sufferings and death. Therefore his poetry was correspondingly ‘real’ . . . But a truer and surely more interesting way to think about Williams’s relation to life and art is to see it dramatically. Insofar as life was composed of strep throat infections, ruptured appendices, apoplectic strokes, thus so far must poetry fling up words with bewildering freshness—so far must it be an expression of nothing more or less than The Imagination. [Pritchard on William Carlos Williams]
The artist, who by nature is always the spectator to many things in life, will experience all of life . . . in himself as though life with all its possibilities had gone straight through him. [Rilke, as quoted by Freedman]
Significant anthologies of the past are flyblown with “household” names we no longer recognize. There is comfort in the nothing-knowing of the future. Annie Ernaux once remarked that she “always wanted to write as if I’d be gone when the book was published. To write as if I would be about to die, no more judges.” There are our range and freedom, in the fact that life and work, although determinedly co-operational, are not coterminous, not sharing either end or boundary. There is what every writer’s life explores and then explodes beyond the life’s capacity: the self-devising, self-expanding, self-relinquishing act of writing itself which is, as in Ernaux’s understanding, one more way of living.
A version of this essay was first presented as a lecture to final-year Creative Writing MSt students at the University of Oxford in 2024.
Camille Ralphs is the author of After You Were, I Am (Faber, 2024; McSweeney's, 2025). She is poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement and teaches at the University of Oxford.