Troubled troubadours: why poets pass away prematurely

poet Silvia Plath

There is a saying “Only the good die young”. As far as poets are concerned this is true, poets die young. This has been shown by numerous studies but so far eluded a satisfactory explanation. From Emily Brontë to Kurt Cobain, poets die young. Why? Poets are afflicted with a number of problems:

• Suicide
• Substance abuse (alcohol most of all)
• Mental health problems ranging from depression to schizophrenia, a phenomenon dubbed the "Sylvia Plath Effect"
• Poor physical health (often the prototypical sickly child)

Many Nobel Prize Laurates, as well as a vast number of American writers (Tennessee Williams, F Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc.), struggled with alcohol addiction. Out of all geniuses, writers have the most trouble lives and among writers, it is the poets, who suffer most. Marcia Davenport once humorously wrote, “All the great poets died young. Fiction is the art of middle age. And essays are the art of old age.”  

There is actually a pattern behind this observation: poetry is the most personal and subjective form of writing, whereas essays are the least subjective form of artful writing. A study found that poets who committed suicide used "I", "me" and "my" much more often than non-suicidal poets. "People who are suicidal or depressed use `I' at much, much higher rates and there is also a corresponding drop in references to other people." Had researchers investigated the lyrics of British songwriter Mark Hollis, who wrote songs like “Such a Shame” and “It’s My Life”, they might have come to the conclusion that Hollis was on the brink of suicide. Fortunately, Mark Hollis escaped the curse of the poets and pass away only in 2019.

Poetry has got a lot with feeling and essays a lot with thinking.  It’s not a coincide that Göthe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther (1974) (a story about unrequited love and suicide) long before he wrote his essays. Most of histories poets from Homer and Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath were “feelers”. There is a personality dimension in the Myers-Briggs system thinking-feeling (T/F), that corresponds loosely to trait “agreeableness” in the Big 5 inventory. This personality trait is correlated with androgen levels as T types typically have low D2:D4 digit ratios, indicative of high levels of testosterone in the womb. I will argue here that most poets belong to the NF personality group, that is derived evolutionarily from a hunter-gather caregiving profile The following chart represents personality types in MBTI, Helen Fisher’s (who studied dating sites) terminology and my terminology derived from the idea of personality types based on ancestral substance economy.

The majority of historically famous writers can be found in the hunter-gatherer group. The most common personality type among poets is INFP (Homer, Shakespeare, Kafka, Saint-Exupery, Kurt Cobain as well as the above mentioned Mark Hollis) with INFJ (Dante, Leonard Cohen) as a close second. It will, therefore, be no surprise that these are the types with the highest suicide rates (INFJ being the least common type, ranking third).

So, what is the connection between poetic creativity and mental disorder? In Dead Poets Society Robin Williams’ character suggests that poets write to get laid. There is definitely some truth to this. The evolutionary psychologist Daniel Nettle in “Schizotypy, creativity and mating success in humans” that schizotypy and the accompanying creativity increase reproductive effort. In egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, individuals can’t impress their potential mates with status and material wealth. Poets are not born macho-types. They are the nice guys who finish last and for who it is hard to attract a mate. It is not surprising that many mental disorders, like schizophrenia, start in late adolescence and early adulthood when most people would have started sex.

What’s more, these “gatherer” types have an overactive amygdala,  the highest sensibility of all types, the highest rates of empathy. They are non-materialist and idealistic. They are the members of society who are most vulnerable to social stress and social anxiety. All this doesn’t make it surprising, that the sickly child (stress weakens the immunes system), the bipolar teen, the unsuccessful writer-alcoholic, the schizoid Kafka and the suicidal Werther are all overrepresented in this group. Poets have become rare, unfortunately.