"[Writing] is Theft" Ctd Thomas Lynch, Yeats, Auden, Heaney, etc.

 

On the death of Seamus Heaney, Michigan-based undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch paid tribute to the Irish poet on BBC Radio 3 with an essay which spoke on the role of combinatorial creativity. He said:

"I stole that thing about a bridge from another poet who read it somewhere or stole it from another one or made it up. It's what we do, rent to own. Borrow, steal, make things up... When Auden got word of Yeats' death he wrote his famous elegy in memory of William Butler Yeats in which he gives his own directive, borrowing the dead man's table manners:

"Earth receive an honored guest

William Yeats is laid to rest,

Let the Irish vessel like emptied of its poetry."

When Brodsky died, too young, too soon in 1996 Heaney borrowed for Audenesque the rhyme and meter that Auden borrowed from Yeats, and Yeats from Blake and Blake from maybe a children's rhyme."

Writing is hard Ctd with Ernest Hemingway

I produced the illustration of Mr Hemingway that you can see above recently with a comforting quote that soothes the disgruntled writer, blogger and other word maker:

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed."

Powerful and emotive language that tells us even Nobel Prize winning writers struggle to put words onto paper. Then just as I was coming to publish this I came across a Brainpickings blog post by Maria Popova, 'Work Alone: Ernest Hemingway’s 1954 Nobel Acceptance Speech.' The stand out quote was the below. Not only is writing hard; it can be and often is a lonely process:

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”