Poets die young....

He died from a love of poetry

Marc Abrahams The Guardian, Tuesday 18 March 2008

Poets, by tradition, imagine themselves likely to die young. But that's not a matter of imagination, says Associate Professor James C Kaufman, of California State University at San Bernardino. It's a simple fact.

Kaufman looked at the lives and deaths of 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures: American, Chinese, Turkish and eastern European. His 2003 study, The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young, paints a mathematically ghoulish picture. Poets drop off earliest, Kaufman explains, but authors in general are not a long-lived bunch.

He writes that: "The image of the writer as a doomed and sometimes tragic figure, bound to die young, can be backed up by research. Writers die young. This research finding has been consistently replicated in a variety of studies."

Before dissecting the body of evidence about poets, Kaufman visits that much larger corpus of published research about writers in general. A 1975 study found that poets tended to die younger than fiction writers. A 1995 study found that "poets died younger than fiction writers, non-fiction writers, and people in the theatre". A 1997 study "found that Japanese writers were more likely to die young than other eminent Japanese". And so on.

Kaufman also mentions, in passing, that a 1985 study by a researcher named Koski "found that some Finnish writers used alcohol to stimulate writing".

Kaufman's own research covers an expanse of time as well as geography - North American authors born as early as 1612, Chinese writers with birthdays as early as 1852, Turkish writers born after 1343, and eastern European writers whose birthdates range back as far as the year 390. In their ranks are, or rather were, fiction writers, poets, playwrights and non-fiction writers.

Kaufman used a statistical tool called Tukey's Honestly Significant Difference test "to determine which differences were significant in each culture, by gender, and overall".

The numbers tell the story. A poet's life, on average, is about a year shorter than that of a playwright, four years shorter than a novelist's life, and five-and-six-tenths years less than that of a non-fiction specialist.

Kaufman's study ends, as do the lives of many poets, on a sad note. He writes: "The fact that a Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton may die young does not necessarily mean an introduction to poetry class should carry a warning that poems may be hazardous to one's health. Yet this study may reinforce the idea of poets being surrounded by an aura of doom, even compared with others who may pick up a pen and paper for other purposes. It is hoped that the data presented here will help poets and mental-health professionals find ways to lessen what appears to be a sometimes negative impact of writing poetry on mortality and mental health."

· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize