Poet Research

Poets done by Chimnese

I have been doing some intense research on several poets

Whether from past or present and there was a deep message

Of there creativity and how their lives shaped them at the time.

Most of these poets were romantically involved and it was

A deep love of affection for the man or woman of their affection.

I have always wondered mostly about the words they have written

In their poetry as it stems from a deep place within themselves,

As a poet from the 21^st century which I am I have come to

Understand myself more as well, that poets have a deep understanding

Of love and the way they pour their souls out into there work.

Poets such Sylvia Plath, Helen Palmer Giesel, Edgar Alan Poe, May Sarton and several

other great poets have had a dark depression in their years of writing.

Most of these poets were prolific writers, but never had the fame

as they have it now in the 21^st century . their works have been studied

And researched by future poets and writers as myself.

The poet is more intone with their souls, there love for there lover

Once they have imprinted on another heart and losing that lover

They become enormously sad and depressed, when suicide happens.

I wont say that all poets or depressed or have a steep dark nature,

But as a poet and having to deal with the things these great pots have written

Before I was born into this life, before I ever picked up the pen and start

To write away my hearts cries…

Helen Palmer Giesel was married to Dr Suess the great poet & children’s writer,

He had an affair with someone whilst being married to Helen.

Helen wrote this in her note to him:  From Wikipedia

Geisel committed suicide in 1967 with an overdose of barbiturates,^[3] after a series of illnesses (including cancer) spanning 13 years.^[4] Despondent over her husband's adulterous relationship with the woman whom he would later marry, Helen felt unable to go on living without him (as outlined in her suicide note). Helen's last note to Ted: "Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, 'failure, failure, failure... I love you so much ... I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you ... My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed ... Sometimes think of the fun we had all thru the years ..." ^[5]
Ted on realizing that Helen was dead: "I didn't know whether to kill myself, burn the house down, or just go away and get lost."^[5]

About Helen's death: "Whatever Helen did, she did it out of absolute love for Ted ... her death was her last and greatest gift to him.



Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes

Two of the greatest poets of all time:
Ted Hughes wrote this in his book “Dreamers’
"The dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her and I knew it,"^[26]
“And here you come, with a cup of tea
Wreathed in steam.
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
You hand me two children, two roses”

From Sylvia Plath’s Journal

"To annihilate the world by annihilation of one's self is the deluded height of desperate egoism. The simple way out of all the little brick dead ends we scratch our nails against.... I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb."

“ If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad ” ~ From Plath's journals

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days. ” ~ From 'The Bell Jar' ~

“ Poetry of this order is a murderous art. ” ~ A. Alvarez, about 'Ariel'

Plath's world had become too much for her to take. The depression had overcome. Just six months before her death she wrote of feeling
"outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass."

Lord Byron

Lord Byron

(1788 - 1824)

George Gordon Byron was born with a lame foot, and his sensitivity to it haunted his life and his works. Overhearing a girl he was infatuated with refer to him as "that lame boy" certainly must have deepened his disappointment at being born with this deformity. A fragile self-esteem made Byron extremely sensitive to criticism, of himself or of his poetry, and he tended to make enemies rather quickly. His poetry, along with his lifestyle, was considered controversial in his time and often deemed "perverted" or even "satanic,". The fact that he was often discontent and unhappy, combined with a constant desire for change meant that he created an unstable world for himself, though he never gave up his individual freedom to choose his own path and his own destiny.

“ Wild, audacious, rebellious, ... half mad by nature; a creature made to tempt and to be tempted, to seduce and to fall, about whom there was but one certainty, that he was irreclaimable. ” ~ John Murray on Byron

The young bachelor had romances and liaisons with several women, many of them married. One of the women aptly remarked that Byron was "mad, bad and dangerous to know." It is rumored that in 1813 he had an incestuous affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. This idea is furthered by themes of incest and forbidden love that appear in several of Byron's poems. In the dramatic poem Manfred, he writes of the hero's love for a woman who is "like me in lineaments; her eyes / Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone / Even of her voice . . . were like to mine."
Byron married Annabella Milbanke in early 1815, and they had a daughter named Ada. But within a year the marriage had dissolved and they were separated. Byron felt hounded by the press, who covered every gossip about his personal and financial affairs. In 1816 he left England in a voluntary exile, never to return. His bitter outlook on life at this time is reflected in the poem Darkness, which he wrote in that same year.

“ His madness was not of the head, but heart. ” ~ Byron in 'Lara' ~

Darkness

By Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress--he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge--
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the Universe.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Tragedy struck the Shelleys again and again in Italy. Baby Clara died in 1818 in Mary's arms while she waited in the hall of an inn for Shelley to find a doctor. Depressed and bitter in December of 1818, in failing health and with a marriage that was falling apart, Shelley composed his Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples, where he writes:
 Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
   Nor peace within nor calm around,
 Nor that content surpassing wealth
   The sage in meditation found,
   And walked with inward glory crowned--
 Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
   Others I see whom these surround--
 Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

“ You were all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was without exception the best and least selfish man I ever knew. ” ~ Byron, upon Shelley's death

Edgar Allan Poe

(1809 - 1849)

Personal tragedy was, unfortunately, a recurring theme throughout Edgar Allan Poe's life. Born in Boston in 1809 to actor parents, he never knew his father David Poe, who left his mother and disappeared soon after Edgar was born, then died in Virginia in 1810. His mother, who suffered from tuberculosis (then called consumption), died in Richmond, Virginia in late 1811, orphaning Edgar, his older brother William Henry, and half-sister Rosalie.

“ From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring. ” ~ Poe in 'Alone'

Once back in Richmond, Edgar began writing poetry regularly when he was in his early teens. He fell in love with a girl named Elmira, and they eventually pledged themselves to each other. In 1826 he was sent to the University of Virginia to study law. His rich foster father, with whom Edgar had always had a tumultuous relationship, gave him a mere $100 to cover yearly expenses that probably totalled to at least $450. Under these circumstances the young man quickly fell into debt, and began gambling in an attempt to make up his losses. On top of this, Elmira's letters to him had been intercepted by both sets of parents and, having received no encouraging replies from Edgar, she was persuaded to become engaged to another man. After this, Edgar began drinking seriously, he had little resistance to alcohol and easily became violent and irrational when he drank too much.

“ All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream. ” ~ Poe in 'A Dream within a Dream' ~

“ I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched. ” ~ Poe in a letter, 1849 ~

Watching his wife Virginia slowly dying almost certainly stimulated Poe's self-destructiveness. His poem The Conqueror Worm, written during this dark period, projects the image of a destructive worm or maggot, and the decay of humankind:
But see, amid the mimic rout
   A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
   The scenic solitude!
It writhes!--it writhes!--with mortal pangs
   The mimes become its food,
And the angels sob at vermin fangs
   In human gore imbued.

In September, Poe left to visit friends and relatives and to look after some business, travelling toward New York City via Baltimore and Philadelphia. He never made it past Baltimore. He arrived there drunk and disappeared for a mysterious five days. He was eventually found in a delirium and taken to the hospital where he clung to life for a few more days. Edgar Allan Poe died on Sunday October 7, 1849. His last words were: "Lord help my poor soul."

Dylan Marlais Thomas

(1914 - 1953)

While Dylan Thomas possessed immense gifts and talent which made him a professional success as a writer, he was often a disappointment on a personal level. Much of this personal failure could have stemmed from an inability to deal with the extreme demands that came with sudden fame. Some explanation must also lie in the various ways his personalities have been described: alternately as humble, shy, confused and insecure on the inside, but outwardly neglectful, selfish, and egotistical -- yet always, and extremely, charming.
His father exposed him to poetry as early as the age of two, and by four Dylan was reciting verses from Shakespeare. He was always fascinated by words, as he wrote many years later to an American admirer:
The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolised, or meant was of very secondary importance -- what mattered was the very sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and quite incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And those words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milk carts, the clapping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing.

“... an overgrown baby who'll destroy every last thing he can get his hands on, including himself. ” ~ Truman Capote, of Dylan Thomas ~

Dylan Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara in the Spring of 1936 in the London pub The Wheatsheaf. Caitlin's previous experiences with men led her to believe that "all men were bastards," yet from the moment she met him she felt Dylan was somehow different. Within hours of their first meeting Dylan, his head in her lap, kept drunkenly insisting that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met and that he was going to marry her -- to which she offered no objections. The slightly older Caitlin, a physically strong, trained dancer with a fiery and unpredictable temper found the impoverished poet vulnerable and sweet, if a bit needy. They spent the next five days and nights together, going from pub to pub and hardly eating at all. Later that summer when he and Caitlin met again in Wales, Dylan had a run-in with Augustus John, a painter and friend of her parents with whom Caitlin had been having an affair. Caitlin and Dylan eventually started living together near the end of 1936.

“... Dylan Thomas made poetry come alive. Listening to his beautiful voice, I was touched deep in my heart by poetry, not in my head ... ” ~ An American student after a Thomas lecture. ~

““ ... he can best be described as suffering from a character neurosis, with increasing depression, dangerous alcoholic acting out, tormenting worry, progressive creative inhibition, indicating a sense of neurotic helplessness ... ” ~ Dr. B. W. Murphy on Dylan Thomas ~

There are many things said and written about Dylan Thomas, and it is difficult to know what is really true and what is not. There is perhaps some small grain of truth found in each story or assessment. Though he was witty, charming, and a great writer and performer, he was at the same time insecure, neglectful and irresponsible. Thanks to his talents with the spoken and written word, however, his works are sure outlive his reputation.

Emmerson describes the poets soul

The Poet's Soul as Described in Emerson's The Poet


Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, entitled " The Poet", takes the reader into a new awareness concerning an artistic writer. This essay created new insight about a writer's handicraft. Emerson shows us how a poet uses his gift to connect a non-artist of words to feelings that he is unable to express. A poet uses his God-given ingredient, the soul, to describe the things that engulf our lives. We, that do not have this talent, are given this connection by the writings in "The Poet".

Emerson resigned his position as a minister to concentrate his life work as a writer. His education and upbringing was rich in matters relating to theology. He describes the poet in terms of religion. He points out the theological term called Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and then equates a poet to this using triple increments. Emerson calls the poet the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. A poet's soul knows what is going on around us. He expresses himself by picking up a pen and saying what's going on. Most people know what senses they are experiencing in their world We are unable to write and/or say in words these experiences. The poet has this unexplainable talent or gift to share with the world.

Emerson describes the poet as having scientific knowledge. He takes language and creates the words to enlighten us about our surroundings. He uses his God-given imagination to create thoughts in the reader's mind that were not present there before. These thoughts activate ideas in a non-poetic person. The reader then produces questions and inventions in areas that he shows expertise.

Emerson shows the reader how a person without this knowledge of writing is omitted from expressing the beauty of nature. He tells us that the poet has the incredible ability to create images by his words to illustrate the things that we observe. Emerson believes that the poet uses his words to represent beauty (1648). The world is beautiful and it is the poet's job to paint his view of this in his words. "... but it is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but beauty is the creator of the universe..." (1648). Emerson's description of beauty is connected to things associatiated with God and nature.

Emerson explains that nature is things that we all are able to experience but aren't necessary able to identify with our vocabulary. A poet is able to announce to the reader the descriptions of the sun, stars, moon and water, and how these substances cause reactions with us. The poet uses his thoughts and formulates his ideas into words. The reader is then able to agree or disagree with his veiwpoint. The reader may be enlightened by the poet's ideas put to words. Emerson's view of nature directs me to think that he feels that the world of nature was created by God and a poet was appointed by God to observe with his senses the sensations of his creation and put this nature to words. Nature offers all her creatures to him, (the poet) as a picture-language.(1650)

He, also, details to the reader about another presence in the world. This is the presence of evil. "The Poet" makes reference to this force throughout the essay. Emerson states that nature is used as a symbol rather than a God created force. He says that "....the vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from a polite conversation...."(1652) . This man chooses to use his words that omit the divine creator as the maker of the things in his nature. This essay was written in 1844, 1847. Today, we can listen to words put to poetry and songs and make judgments if there is an evilness or goodness about the composure of the words.

Another factor that Emerson points out about a poet is that his work may".... lead to a life of pleasure and indulgence.; all but the few who received the true nectar......they were punished for that advantaged that they won, by dissipation and deterioration.... the great presence of the world comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine...... (1656). Emerson goes on to say that the poets in the early nineteenth century were more effective if their inspiration came from God's wine than the 'Devil's wine'. This indicated to me that a poets word's were worth more to the reader if they were not derived from intoxicating substances such as liquor, cocaine or downers. I know from experience that the only people that can relate to this kind of expression are people who have problems of their own.

I know personally famous writers that were given the inspiration to write Grammy-winning words and took their money and indulged in narcotics and "Devil wine'. These writers, or poets, lost every materialistic thing that they owned. One friend died drunk. Some would sober-up through a program implemented an Indian symbol that was used to represent their organization of help. This Indian symbol stood for three things (mind, body, spirit) just as the Trinity and Emerson's description of a poet is represented by three aspects. This organization incorporates God as the inspirational power to aid the people. Some of the poets that allowed God to help them once again wrote inspirational #1 words. Emerson's essay is based on a poet's soul being inspired by a force that called God to motivate the poet to record words. These words cause the reader to find feelings that they could not verbalize. These feelings will then be quickly learned by the intellectual man that he capable of providing himself with new energy beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect.

Research websites

Emerson on The Poet Soul http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=18865  

Helen Palmer Giesel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Palmer_Geisel

Neurotic Poets 

Sylvia Plath http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/

 Lord Byron http://www.neuroticpoets.com/byron/

 Edgar Alan Poe http://www.neuroticpoets.com/poe/

Dylan Thomas http://www.neuroticpoets.com/thomas/