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.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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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.