Parenting & Family Quote by Tom Wolfe

Wolfe is doing what he does best: building a gaudy, high-speed diorama of cultural power, then yanking the lights to show who’s been swapped in and who’s been written out. The sentence starts in elegy mode - “young and dead and famous” - a deliberately romantic inventory of the classic male poet myth, the Keats-by-way-of-posterity template where tragedy functions like a credential. Then comes the pivot: the archetype hasn’t merely evolved; it has “changed,” as if the culture’s casting director has made a cold, administrative decision.

The subtext is less about poetry than about prestige. Wolfe is tracking how societies assign glamour to suffering and who gets to embody “destiny.” By calling the poet a “tragic child,” he infantilizes genius on purpose: the poet is not an adult worker but a doomed prodigy, a figure the public can adore without having to take seriously as a peer. When Wolfe declares that “the child of genius was a woman,” he’s registering a shift in the public story of creativity - not necessarily a rise in women’s writing (which had always been there), but a change in who gets framed as the emblem of artistic fatalism.

It’s also Wolfe’s canny, needling provocation. “And the man was gone” reads like a taunt aimed at male cultural gatekeepers: you wanted legend more than literature, and now the legend has new skin. In late-20th-century media culture - celebrity memoir, confessional art, the marketplace for personal catastrophe - Wolfe spots a transfer of the tragic aura from the male poet to the female “genius” as spectacle, with all the admiration and exploitation that implies.