There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead

Host: The night hung blue and electric over the city, the kind of urban darkness that buzzes with neon, memory, and the distant hum of cars still searching for somewhere to belong. In a half-lit gallery, the walls were lined with portraits — faces of poets, painters, and prophets, all immortalized in the moment before their ruin.

The crowd had thinned. Only Jack and Jeeny remained — two shadows caught between art and time.

Jack stood before a photograph of Sylvia Plath — her eyes bright, her smile defiant, her ghost unmistakable.

Jeeny, seated on the marble step beneath, held a small program in her lap, its edges creased, her fingers tracing the names as though reading prayers.

The quote on the wall above them, in soft gold letters, read:
"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." — Tom Wolfe

Jeeny: “It’s strange, isn’t it? The way Wolfe said it — almost like a funeral for the male poet.”

Jack: “Or a crowning for the female one. Depends which side of the grave you’re standing on.”

Jeeny: “You make it sound like a competition.”

Jack: “Isn’t it? Every era needs its tragedy — and every tragedy needs a star. Once it was Byron, Keats, Rimbaud. Now it’s Plath, Sexton, Woolf. The gender just shifted — the myth stayed the same.”

Jeeny: “No, Jack. It’s not just the gender that changed — it’s the reason. The male poets you named — they died in pursuit of grandeur. The women Wolfe writes about — they died in pursuit of freedom.”

Host: The light from the gallery’s overhead lamps softened, turning the white of the walls into a ghostly gray. Outside, the rain began to fall, tapping lightly against the glass, as if echoing their words.

Jack: “Freedom, grandeur — same coin, different faces. Both kill their owners eventually.”

Jeeny: “You sound like you envy them.”

Jack: “Maybe I do. The male poet had fire, Jeeny. Rage, ambition, romance with his own doom. The modern poet — she has introspection, melancholy, therapy. We’ve traded the tempest for self-help.”

Jeeny: “You mean we’ve traded posturing for truth. The male genius was allowed to burn and call it art. The woman burns and the world calls it madness.”

Jack: “Because it is madness, Jeeny. The difference is the men didn’t apologize for it. They owned their self-destruction. The women turned it into a confession.”

Jeeny: “And that’s what made them real, Jack. The men turned madness into a mask. The women turned it into a mirror.”

Host: The gallery’s silence was dense, full of ghosts and echoes. The air seemed to carry the breath of every poet who ever walked the line between beauty and death.

Jeeny stood, walked slowly to the next photograph — Anne Sexton, her eyes half-shadowed, mouth caught between a smile and a scream.

Jeeny: “You see that? She’s smiling, but you can feel the pain in it. That’s what Wolfe meant — the poet became a woman because the world finally started listening to pain without needing it to wear a hero’s mask.”

Jack: “No, Jeeny. The world started romanticizing it. We worship the female poet’s suffering the way we once worshiped the male poet’s recklessness. Different brand, same addiction.”

Jeeny: “You think art should be clean then? Safe? Without wounds?”

Jack: “No. I just think we’ve swung the pendulum too far. Now every poem has to bleed. Every story has to confess. The new poet doesn’t sing — she aches. And we call that progress.”

Jeeny: “Maybe it is. Because aching means feeling, and feeling means truth. The male poet wrote of stars — the female poet writes of wounds. One dreamed, the other endured.”

Host: The rain had deepened, pouring now, sheets of silver cutting through the city’s neon. The gallery lights flickered — a small storm inside and out.

Jack: “You know, Jeeny, maybe Wolfe wasn’t mourning the male poet. Maybe he was warning us — that when art becomes all autobiography, when every poet writes their own funeral, grandeur dies with it.”

Jeeny: “But what is grandeur, Jack? A man dying in Rome for a line of verse? Or a woman surviving her own mind long enough to write about it?”

Jack: “You call that survival? They all ended the same — Sylvia, Anne, Virginia — all gone before they were old enough** to regret** their genius.”

Jeeny: “And yet, they wrote their way into eternity. That’s the difference. The male poets died for glory. The female ones died for truth.”

Jack: “And maybe the truth was too heavy for them.”

Jeeny: “Or maybe it was too heavy for the world to carry, and so it broke them instead.”

Host: The rain softened again, thinning into a quiet drizzle, as though the storm had said its piece. The lights warmed, turning the gallery from a temple of memory to something more tender — a room for understanding.

Jeeny turned, her eyes dark and wet, not from tears, but from that brightness people have when they are certain they are right.

Jeeny: “Wolfe saw the shift, but he called it a loss. I think it was a rebirth. For the first time, genius didn’t look like a man in a tweed coat — it looked like a woman holding a pen and a bruise.”

Jack: “You really think genius has a gender, Jeeny?”

Jeeny: “No. But I think suffering was finally allowed to.”

Jack: “So now the poet isn’t the prophet, but the witness.”

Jeeny: “Yes. The witness to what the world does when it refuses to listen.”

Jack: “And the man? What happens to him?”

Jeeny: “He listens. Finally.”

Host: The silence that followed was thick, but not cold. It was the kind of silence that heals, that recognizes something has shifted, maybe forever.

Jack looked again at the photographs — faces of women who had suffered, written, and vanished, yet remained more alive than most men he’d ever known.

Jack: “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the male poet didn’t die — maybe he just changed form. Maybe he became the audience, the one finally learning to listen.”

Jeeny: “Then that’s not an ending, Jack. That’s an evolution.”

Jack: “Evolution always hurts.”

Jeeny: “So does birth.”

Host: The rain had stopped. The city outside shimmered, wet and reflective, its lights like poems written across puddles.

In the gallery, the faces on the walls seemed to breathe — men and women, dead but still arguing, still writing.

Jack and Jeeny stood before them — two voices of a new century, each carrying the echo of the last.

Jack: “Maybe that’s the real tragedy of the poet, Jeeny — not that they die young, but that they feel too much too soon.”

Jeeny: “And maybe that’s the real grandeur — that they keep feeling, even when the world stops.”

Host: The lights dimmed, and for a moment, all that was left was the sound of breathing, the faint hum of electricity, and the presence of those who had written their souls into the air.

And as they left, the door closed softly behind them, leaving the poets — men and women alike — together, equal, eternal in their ache, their art, and their forgiveness of a world that never knew how to love them until they were gone.