Ars Longa Vita Brevis!

ByRatan Bhattacharjee

Those whom gods love, die young’ — Shelley wrote this in his elegy written on Keats after his immature death. Shelley himself was drowned at the age of 30.
Sylvia Plath died at the age of 31. Oscar Wilde lived to be 46 and Jane Austen was only 41 when she died of undetermined causes. Edgar Allan Poe was just 40 when he fell possibly drunk into his Baltimore gutter. None of the Bronte sisters survived past their 30’s.
Bengali poet Sukanta Bhattacharya died a premature death at the age of 21. But all these short lives have a long-lived literary influence.
Death is inevitable for many of us. Death may not be something that many of us like to think about, but it does cross our mind, especially when someone important to us dies, when we are in situations where death seems likely or when we are comforting someone who is facing death. But if creative writers commit suicide then the matter seems to be utterly depressing.
The Sylvia Plath Effect is the phenomenon that poets are more susceptible to mental illness than other creative writers. The term was coined in 2001 by psychologist James C. Kaufman.
Although many studies (example: Andreasen, 1987; Jamison, 1989; Ludwig, 1995) have demonstrated that creative writers are prone to suffer from mental illness, this relationship has not been examined in depth.
Kaufman’s work (2011) further demonstrated that female poets were more likely to suffer from mental illness than any other class of writers. With premature death as a strict censor, one can speculate that, at some point, had Plath lived longer, she might have developed a manic psychosis.
In addition, female poets were more likely to be mentally ill than other eminent women, such as politicians, actresses and artists. This is also a half truth.
Jibananda Das, a great poet of Bengal, also seemed to have attempted suicide at the age of 55. Author and literary critic Amit Chaudhuri concurs, describing Das’s writing with admiration: “The poems are now part of the Bengali consciousness, on both sides of the border dividing India from what was Pakistan and is now Bangladesh; it’s safe to claim that Das is the pre-eminent and best loved Bengali poet after Tagore.”
For the poets in the latter half of the 20th century Das “has practically come to take place of Tagore”. Das’s oeuvre is eclectic and resists classification under any single heading or school.
Das wrote ceaselessly, but as he was an introvert and the “most alone of [Bengali] poets”, he felt “compelled to suppress some of his most important writings or to locate them in a secret life”. During his lifetime, only seven volumes of his poems were published. After his death, it was discovered that apart from poems Das wrote several novels and a large number of short stories. His unpublished works are still being published.
Das died eight days after he was hit by a tramcar. Witnesses said though the tramcar whistled, he did not stop and got struck. Some deem the accident as an attempt at suicide. It may be depression or some psychic illness.
Even Karl Marx or Charles Darwin suffered severe depression in their life though they did not commit suicide. But Mayakovsky committed suicide although he was renowned as a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement; being among the signers of the Futurist manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1913), and authoring poems such as A Cloud in Trousers (1915) and Backbone Flute (1916).
Mayakovsky produced a large and diverse body of work during the course of his career: he wrote poems, wrote and directed plays, appeared in films, edited the art journal LEF, and created agitprop posters in support of the Communist Party during the Russian Civil War. Though Mayakovsky’s work regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Communist Party and a strong admiration of Lenin, his relationship with the Soviet state was always complex and often tumultuous.
Mayakovsky often found himself engaged in confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet State in cultural censorship and the development of the State doctrine of Socialist realism. Works that contained criticism or satire of aspects of the Soviet system, such as the poem ‘Talking With the Taxman About Poetry’ (1926), and the plays The Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1929), were met with scorn by the Soviet state and literary establishment.
At the age of 36, Mayakovsky committed suicide. Even after death his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady. Though Mayakovsky had previously been harshly criticised by Stalinist governmental bodies like RAPP, Joseph Stalin posthumously declared Mayakovsky “the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch”. Had the poet got this recognition, he might not have committed suicide. Some poets did not die, they were killed.
We recall the premature death of Garcio Lorca, the great Spanish poet who was killed only at the age of 38 by Franco’s fascist forces. Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of ’27. The Generation of ’27 was a group consisting of mostly poets who introduced the tenets of European movements (such as symbolism, futurism, and surrealism) into Spanish literature. He was executed by nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. His body has never been found.
In 2008, a Spanish judge opened an investigation into Lorca’s death. The García Lorca family eventually dropped objections to the excavation of a potential gravesite near Alfacar, but no human remains were found.
Still dying young cannot be the cause of great writing. Tolstoy and Wordsworth all died at the age of 80. Even Shakespeare lived more than fifty years. But Shakespeare too died four years before his death as he stopped writing a single line for the last four years. No one till today deciphered the mystery why Shakespeare could not write for the long four years when he was so successful that time as a dramatist.
I imagine a poet who writes timeless and ageless literature living a longer life than average human beings. Pen is mightier than everthing, even death. But age comes or not death comes sometimes unwarranted. I cannot resist the temptation of quoting some lines I read somewhere online on the Old Age:
“I am setting myself up to lumber through old age/Not in quiet strength/But profane, garrulous/Taking on all comers, inviting a certain degree of trouble/and quarrel/Something I never did in my youth”.
At least these ever dissatisfied poetic souls could live without committing suicide.
Ars longa vita brevis. Art is long, life is short. Long live Poets at least in their poetry.

(The author is Associate Professor & Head of the Department of PG English, Dum Dum Motijheel College, Kolkata)