Literary misery index

I swore I'd never become one of those people who say, "did you see that piece in The Times? Unless I was talking to people who'd already seen the piece.

British researchers sifted three million English language books through a statistical sieve, creating what they call a"literary misery index"--a calculation that subtracts the frequency of words associated with happiness from words associated with sadness--matched it up with a well-known indicator, the economic misery index--finding that literary misery in a given year correlated with the average of the previous decade's economic misery index numbers.

Michael said, all of literature is but the alphabet re-arranged. He said Cocteau said it. It sounds French, but I'm unable at this point to verify that it was Cocteau or someone else.

The first Greek poets dictated their work, so that it had the possibility of becoming permanent or of vanishing completely. One of the history's of writing, as studied in ancient texts found in Japan and Melanesia, "offered ways of fixing mythology, historicizing traditions and creating pasts that could measure up to their very different present situations,", acc. Marcel Detinne in "The Greeks and Us", (Polity Press, 2005).

Bad people can write good poems as easily as good people can write bad ones. The idea of living up to poetry, of becoming a poet who writes poems with that thought, that his actual life, his whole way of living, is involved and that the writing of the poem is a reaching up and into everything that's beyond him at the present moment, seems like the right idea.