Egads and achoo,
Oh what should I do?
Alas and achoo,
I’m dying of flu.

Yes, gentle reader, tis true. Tis a pity its true, and tis true its a pity. However, I sense, as do those poor souls within germ-range of my snivels, that I am dying. I was going to tell you of other early deaths of literary luminaries, such as Emily Bronte who produced Wuthering Heights and promptly died of tuberculosis at the age of 30. And then poor, imaginative John Keats, whose lyric poetry suffered an onset of tuberculosis. However, startling and terrible research from the trusty google search must take precedence.

A study entitled The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young (from this article in The Guardian) says just that. Associate Professor James C Kaufman of California State University researched 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures. Kaufman writes that:

“the image of the writer as a doomed and sometimes tragic figure, bound to die young, can be backed up by research. Writers die young. This research finding has been consistently replicated in a variety of studies.”

You see? I’m doomed. And it gets worse….the article writes that “a poet’s life, on average, is about a year shorter than that of a playwright, four years shorter than a novelist’s life, and five-and-six-tenths years less than that of a non-fiction specialist.”

Here, I am, on my death bed, penning away. Just like Bronte over Wuthering Heights, if one considers it metaphorically, and then extends the metaphor to include a whiny blogger. On the other hand, I might not need to worry about a poet’s shorter life span, judging from the poetry above.

Ah, onward Thursday! Heigh ho!