Paul Celan’s body was not found for eleven days after he stepped off the Pont Mirabeau.
Nelly Sachs died on the day of his funeral.
Only when Euripides was being performed would Socrates go to the theater.
Rossini, on the Symphony Fantastique:
What a good thing it isn’t music.
The Sabine farm.
Which is to say that Writer can even have headaches, then?
Writer can have headaches.
Walter Scott frequently manufactured chapter epigraphs out of whole cloth, saying what he wished said, and then wrote in either Old Play or Anon. as the alleged source.
Paul Robeson died of pneumonia and kidney failure.
The King James Bible, the First Folio — both during James I.
Who on the other hand did not pay Chapman the royal stipend due on his translations.
According to Plutarch, Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times at his death.
Dvořák, to Sibelius: I have composed too much.
Brahms, to Dvořák: You do write a bit hastily.
Norman Mailer’s sixth wife was the same age as his oldest daughter.
O, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
Writer does have headaches.
In fact so did Virgil.
And Wordsworth.
Robert Lowell was in and out of mental institutions repeatedly.
Theodore Roethke was in and out of mental institutions repeatedly.
Roethke at least once taken in in handcuffs.
Madame Butterfly is set in Nagasaki.
And they so eagerly pressed towards the body, and so many daggers were hacking together, that they cut one another; Brutus, particularly, received a wound in his hand, and all of them were besmeared with blood.
Anna Akhmatova died after a series of heart attacks.
A grace to say before reading the Oresteia?
Before Kafka?
Wee Willie Keeler was five feet four and a half inches tall.
Balzac was five feet two.
Schubert was five one and a half.
Keats was less than five one.
A hyena that writes poetry on tombs, Nietzsche called Dante.
Martin Luther’s own words, re the origin at Wittenberg Monastery of the key principles of the Protestant Reformation:
This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.
Anne Bradstreet died of what was then called consumption.
Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave.
Domenico Scarlatti was known to cross himself in veneration when talking about Handel’s skill at the organ.
This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.
Said Robert Rauschenberg in a telegram to a Paris art gallery.
Piero di Cosimo was found dead at the foot of a flight of stairs.
Hagia Sophia.
A woman named Mrs. Simon:
Who watched an elderly man on a train put his head out a window during an unrelenting November thunderstorm and hold it there for fully ten minutes.
And a year later at the Royal Academy came upon Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed on exhibition.
Chi son? Chi son? Son un poeta.
Che cosa faccio? Scrivo.
Lavoisier was guillotined in the Reign of Terror.
The holy curiosity of enquiry, Einstein spoke of.
Paul Gauguin apparently died of a heart attack.
I pray you, give me leave to go from hence;
I am not welclass="underline" send the deed after me,
And I will sign it.
When I saw a performance of this play at Drury Lane, a beautiful pale-faced Englishwoman stood behind me in the box and wept profusely at the end of the fourth act, and called out repeatedly: The poor man is wronged.
Wrote Heinrich Heine.
The assumption that Shylock is the merchant meant by the title.
James Joyce and Isaac Babel were once guests at the same dinner party.
E come vivo? Vivo.
This is a novel if Writer or Robert Rauschenberg says so.
Golder’s Green, Sigmund Freud’s ashes were buried at.
In the Jewish cemetery where Conchita Supervia is also buried.
Before the Normans brought despair, the Anglo-Saxon word was wanhope.
Edmund Wilson once punched Mary McCarthy in the face.
The frequent stags and deer in Lucas Cranach. Dogs barked when they saw them, someone said.
As birds flying into the cathedral at Seville were said to peck at the fruit in Murillo’s St. Anthony of Padua.
Or other birds in an identical story about grapes in a panel by Zeuxis two millennia earlier.
Greater than any of us, Yeats called Rabindranath Tagore.
Descartes had an illegitimate daughter, named Francine, whom he loved dearly. And who died at five.
Wanhope.
Joan Sutherland’s mezzo, Marilyn Horne was sometimes mindlessly pigeonholed as, early on.
Wagner insisted that Christ was not a Jew.
Though that Brahms was.
Murillo died after a fall from a scaffold.
Rudyard Kipling and Angela Thirkell were cousins.
I am going to drink myself dead, Modigliani made it known.
But died of tubercular meningitis.
Numerus clausus.
Ludwig Geyer.
And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it.
Gladstone read the Iliad thirty times.
Defoe, of the same opus:
A Ballad-Singer’s Fable to get a Penny. All for the Rescue of a Whore.
Benny Goodman died of a heart attack while practicing Mozart.
Eleonora Duse died of pneumonia. In Pittsburgh.
There is no bay across from China, for the dawn to come up like thunder out of, anywhere near any road to Mandalay.
Cousin Ruddy.
I was twenty-five and he was sleeping with all the women, and at twenty-five you don’t stand for that, even from a poet.
Said Marie Laurencin, of a breakup with Apollinaire.
This is even an epic poem, if Writer says so.
Requiring no one’s corroboration.
Thomas Hardy was abusive to servants.
Tolstoy more so.
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. Being Samuel Johnson’s précis of the poet’s life.
Despondency and madness. Being Wordsworth’s summation of the end of same.
Henry James once hid behind a tree to avoid having to spend time with Ford Madox Ford.
The actress in Dickens’ life was Ellen Ternan, who was twenty-seven years younger than he. Dickens would leave her a thousand pounds in his will.