Are you a Picasso or Cezanne? A T.S. Eliot or a Mark Twain?Actually, you're probably none of the above, but the *good news* is that MALCOLM GLADWELL has a new article about types of geniuses. Picasso and Eliot were prodigies, Cezanne and Twain were late-blooming talents.
Gladwell opines about why we tend to think geniuses must be precocious, and how this may be off-the-mark.
"The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition."
It took Mark Twain over a decade to compose Huckleberry Finn.
I like the opening page of Gladwell's article, that lists the "top 11 poems" of the literary canon, and ranks them by age of author.
The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.”
Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively.
I don't think I'm either type of genius, but it's fun to analyze the creative process. Now, I'm off to read the top poems (after I watch Gossip Girl...)
Painting by Cezanne, "Portrait of Gustave Geffroy"
