Insanity and genius are a pretty thin line... :)
Again, Ginsberg is interesting as a case study more than a figure of admiration. The interesting part isn’t thinking of him as a great guy, it’s seeing the chaos and emotion pouring out of a broken human being. At any rate, it’s a lot more interesting than a lot of more generic flowery poets, and surprisingly less navel-gazy since it seems more haunted than contrived.
I do like Robert Burns a lot though, out of the old-school poet. The man starved to death too; way more hardcore living than most modern poets. Interesting story: supposedly after he died, a bunch of fans and public figures felt bad that he hadn’t gotten enough support to keep fed, so they raised funds and built him a monument. To which his mother replied “Och! Me Bobby ask’d fer bread and ye gave him a stone!”
>>Insanity and genius are a pretty thin line... :)<<
I understand. I was an Office Manager for Psychs in my past life (pre-kids). I saw one family with a Schizophrenic mother and son, yet the rest of the family were rocket scientist working for NASA.
However, I’ve seen many people making the call of genius when it’s the pure ramblings of the insane. This poet was insane.
“I do like Robert Burns a lot though, out of the old-school poet. The man starved to death too; way more hardcore living than most modern poets.”
It was a different world that he lived in. Incidentally, I never heard anything about Burns starving to death. I had heard that he suffered rheumatic heart failure due to too much childhood exertion on an inadequate diet.
At that time, artists really couldn’t make a decent living without the support of an aristocratic patron. Mozart tried to live independently and ended up dying impoverished at the age of 31.