I have been thinking lately of poets - and other writers - without children. The world is such a fertile place, and April's cruel green shoots are coming. Yet, T.S. Eliot had no children - a fact I find less commented on than might be, since it immediately casts many of his poems about barren and fertile ground into new light. Blake had no children with his wife, either. I note, too that Jane Austen and Karen Blixen did not have children. Neither did Mahmoud Darwish. Or of course, Larkin. Or Emily Dickinson. Or Hart Crane. Among the busy world, many go by without offspring.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
Comments
It was a man (Cyril Connolly?) who said the pram in the hall was art's greatest enemy, and the poet George Mackay Brown once told me he thought every child a writer had was one book they wouldn't write. Presumably the logic is that the need to earn a living for the family gets in the way. OTOH, Charles Dickens seems to have found the pressure a stimulus if anything.
It’s not good to generalize, but great poets, unless they can delegate child raising to his/her spouse, probably shouldn’t have children. Poets live too much inside their own heads, having children means often having to choose between satisfying the urge to write (create) and satisfying a child’s need for attention.
Ironically one of the most beautiful and truthfully motherhood poem was “morning song” by Plath.