Deaths of the Poets

From Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work. The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just an illusion , or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry? In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.

About the Author :
Michael Symmons Roberts (Author) Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. He has published eight collections of poetry and received a number of accolades including the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. His Selected Poems was published in 2016. As a librettist, his work has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world, and he is an award-winning broadcaster and dramatist. He is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, his Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong was published in 2025. Paul Farley (Author) Paul Farley is the author of four collections of poetry and has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the E.M. Forster Award. He broadcasts regularly on radio and presents The Echo Chamber on Radio 4. Edgelands, co-written with Michael Symmons Roberts, received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award and the 2011 Foyles Best Book of Ideas Award and was serialised as Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Review :
A rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing. So much material of such innate interest is presented with just the right balance of panache, wit, insight and elegy… A good, clever, kindly and enjoyable book it is, like eavesdropping on two smarter friends when they are sparking off each other… Farley and Roberts are always entertaining and illuminating, gentle guides and quixotic questers. Deaths of the Poets is packed with anecdotes and macabre frisons; its forays through some of poetry’s more sensational edge-lands make for a compelling read. A terrifically entertaining book: thoughtful, funny, informative, with an eye for good quotes and anecdotes, and wide-ranging in both the distance it travels and the material on which it draws. Deaths of the Poets is a gripping, witty read, but also asks serious questions about the way the post-Romantic myth of the doomed poet skews the way we interpret their work. It is a thoughtful book, structured as a series of pilgrimages to the places where poets have died. The authors are agreeable, well-informed and slyly humorous company. Poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts make a comic routine out of their own relative longevity… An absorbing, if melancholy trip. On their pilgrimage, Michael and Paul honour their poetic heroes, but also investigate and interrogate the myth, sending themselves up in the process. The result is a book… that is enlightening and provocative, eye-wateringly funny and powerfully moving. The book is a fascinating if slightly ghoulish examination of poets’ deathbeds, and sometimes their last words, such as Philip Larkin’s bleak remark, “I am going to the inevitable”… Deaths of the Poets is highly readable, informative and resonating with a literary hinterland.