"There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone"
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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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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