Consider: Creative Context

I came across an interesting piece on a new work entitled “The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson,” a novel imagining the life of the poet. This part of the review ingrigued me:

Whether they’re true or not, myths and legends that surround poets help us to see their work in a comprehensible context. Say the names Keats, Poe or Plath, for instance, and images of consumption, drug addiction and mental illness may come to mind, just as the image of 19th century poet Emily Dickinson as an eccentric recluse has persisted largely based on her poetry and a few scraps of biographical information.

I made a post recently about creativity and mentality, and expressed my indictments against the romanticization of madness, i.e. I don’t want to know that so and so was mentally unstable (though that phrasing, to me, is redundant) in an attempt to strengthen the mystique of a work. Yet, the statement above is interesting. Is, what may seem like peripheral information about the poet, useful as a way of making a poem’s meaning more discernable to a reader, a way to make a work more penetrable?

You can read the entire article here.