Age and Artists, Pt. II
Michael Blowhard links to a discussion of age and artists here.
He and I shot the breeze on this topic earlier here and here.
Here are a few more thoughts:
1. In his earlier response to me, Michael makes the remark that, among artists, lyric poets tend to burn out earliest. I'm not so sure about that; by any stretch Yeats, Hardy, and Robert Penn Warren were lyric poets and yet they were very productive late in life. It is true that certain delicate, highly sensitive poets like Whitman, and Tennyson tend to burn out early. (Maybe Shelley and Keats, dead before they turned thirty, would have done the same, but we'll never know.) And it does seem that it is lyric poets with a rougher style who are most productive in old age: Browning, Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Warren. (How Wordsworth, burnt out before he turned 40, fits into all this I do not know; he shares with Tennyson and Whitman an intense focus on human suffering, but his style is often rough and Miltonic.)
2. As the commenters over at Borjas' blog have pointed out, it is hard to tell if the decreased productivity of rock stars is due the nature of their art or their ingestion of chemicals. Interestingly, the rock band with the most staying power has been the relatively clean living, quasi-Christian U2.
3. Energy matters. Coming up with new ideas is hard work. Putting them into the right order is hard work. A lot of artists seem most productive from their late 20s to their early 40s, when they have fully mastered their art and have aquired some experience of life, yet still possess enough energy to put their ideas into practice. Even artists like U2 and Robert Frost, who manage to break out of the pattern somewhat, still seem to slow down later in life. U2 haven't reached the heights of The Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby (though each album since has had at least one amazing track: Stay, Staring at the Sun, Miss Sarajevo, Beautiful Day, Electrical Storm, Vertigo). Frost produced amazing work late in life, but his later collections do contain more padding than those of middle age.
4. Finally, something from Victor Hugo: "In the eyes of the young there is fire, but in the eyes of the old, illumination."
From "Boaz"
He and I shot the breeze on this topic earlier here and here.
Here are a few more thoughts:
1. In his earlier response to me, Michael makes the remark that, among artists, lyric poets tend to burn out earliest. I'm not so sure about that; by any stretch Yeats, Hardy, and Robert Penn Warren were lyric poets and yet they were very productive late in life. It is true that certain delicate, highly sensitive poets like Whitman, and Tennyson tend to burn out early. (Maybe Shelley and Keats, dead before they turned thirty, would have done the same, but we'll never know.) And it does seem that it is lyric poets with a rougher style who are most productive in old age: Browning, Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Warren. (How Wordsworth, burnt out before he turned 40, fits into all this I do not know; he shares with Tennyson and Whitman an intense focus on human suffering, but his style is often rough and Miltonic.)
2. As the commenters over at Borjas' blog have pointed out, it is hard to tell if the decreased productivity of rock stars is due the nature of their art or their ingestion of chemicals. Interestingly, the rock band with the most staying power has been the relatively clean living, quasi-Christian U2.
3. Energy matters. Coming up with new ideas is hard work. Putting them into the right order is hard work. A lot of artists seem most productive from their late 20s to their early 40s, when they have fully mastered their art and have aquired some experience of life, yet still possess enough energy to put their ideas into practice. Even artists like U2 and Robert Frost, who manage to break out of the pattern somewhat, still seem to slow down later in life. U2 haven't reached the heights of The Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby (though each album since has had at least one amazing track: Stay, Staring at the Sun, Miss Sarajevo, Beautiful Day, Electrical Storm, Vertigo). Frost produced amazing work late in life, but his later collections do contain more padding than those of middle age.
4. Finally, something from Victor Hugo: "In the eyes of the young there is fire, but in the eyes of the old, illumination."
From "Boaz"
posted by Thursday at
2:11 PM
2 Comments:
If you have access to a good library, or just want to buy the book, Dean Simonton's *Origins of Genius* is a necessary read for this topic. Starting on p.159, he discusses the career trajectories of artists & scientists. Lyric poets really do tend to peak early, ditto for mathematicians.
He deals with the overall trend, though, of creative people tending to peak around 20 years after they start their career.
Milan Kundera wrote a novel called "The Lyric Age" about the age at which young writers are most oriented toward lyric poetry -- roughly 16 to 25.
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