A deadly day for us poets

I don't want to emulate Shakespeare by dying on April 23; but we should remember all those other bards who did

Ian McMillan in the guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 April 2009

I'll be staying in all day today, no matter how sunny and springlike it gets. I'll cower behind the settee in a hard hat and persuade my wife to bring my meals on a tray, making sure that she tastes them first, or at least offers them to our grandson. If anybody knocks on the door I'll ignore them; if the phone rings I won't pick it up. The reason for this extreme, almost paranoid, caution is that the 23rd of April is a bad, bad day to be a poet. It's the cruellest day in the cruellest month, as TS Eliot almost said.

Lots of people know that today is the day William Shakespeare, the greatest poet in the language, was born in 1564 and that it's the day he died in 1616.

I don't want to sound like a local radio DJ doing a less than cheery "on this day" feature for dark times, but for poets in particular, and for creative literary people in general, this day really is hard to ignore: William Wordsworth wandered his last lonely walk on this day, as did the great Spanish author Cervantes. Henry Vaughan, the Welsh metaphysical poet, breathed his last lungful of gorgeous Welsh air on this day. Rupert Brooke died today in 1915, and Harold Arlen – whose songs such as Stormy Weather and Let's Fall in Love (mind you, he didn't write the lyrics) approach the status of poetry – passed to the far side of the rainbow on 23 April 1986.

You might say that because there are only a certain number of days in the year and there are more than enough poets to go round, then any day is going to be peppered with cadaverous bards, but I'm afraid that's just not true. Take yesterday, for instance, 22 April. We lost only Hans A baron von Abschatz on that day: bad for him and his fans, but hardly a poetic massacre. No, there's something about today, something about late frosts or April showers or bodies that have fought their way through the winter months finally giving up the struggle. There's perhaps also something about being called William as well as being a poet that weakens you in April, but that's just speculation on my part.
Poets are notoriously sensitive souls, of course, so it could just be that if you're a poet death is catching, like flu. That would explain, in a pseudo-scientific way, the number of dead poets littering the ground on 23 April. Henry Vaughan mourns the memory of Shakespeare and keels over in a muddy Welsh field. Wordsworth contemplates the deaths of Shakespeare and Vaughan and feels the world growing fuzzy and dim as his throat tightens. Rupert Brooke died at 4.46pm on an island in the Aegean, and who knows if the shades of Shakespeare and Vaughan and Wordsworth were standing before him, beckoning him home?

The thing is, the deaths of all these writers are overshadowed by Shakespeare's. Perhaps it's time to celebrate the versifiers who fell under Shakespeare's shadow, who walk a little way behind his coffin in the pale spring sun.
Let's campaign for something I'm going to call "Shakespeare Death Day Equivalence", which I have to admit isn't a phrase that trips off the tongue, but it does the job like a good sestina. Every time we note Shakespeare's death we also remember Vaughan or ­Wordsworth or Brooke. Or Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls who died on the 23rd of April and was a poet in his own way.

Or, and maybe this is the most ­important thing, let's note the deaths of the amateur and uncelebrated poets who died today. The uncle whose limericks livened up many a family Christmas; the woman in the office who always wrote a poem in someone's ­leaving card; the couple who presented each other with sloppy sentimental verses in bunches of roses. Out from under the shadow of Shakespeare, each and every one!
I'll just crouch further down, though, behind the settee. I've got a bit of a headache coming on.