Is there any rhyme or reason to the claim that dissolute living is a requirement for creating great art?

Notre Dame professor Ralph McInerny thinks not.

Writing at The Catholic Thing website, McInerny pokes holes in the thesis that morally disordered lives were the necessary condition for the creation of the great verse crafted by poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay.

“I love Edna St. Vincent Millay — the poems, not the person; she never answered my letters — but the poor woman’s life was a long spiral into drugged and drunken disaster,” McInerny says. “Her candle burned at both ends and, in the phrase, she went both ways. Nonetheless, a recent life of the poet celebrates her self-destructive behavior under the romantic illusion that defying the decalogue is the price that had to be paid for that exquisite verse.”

McInerny goes on to consider other examples of artists whose pathetic personal lives personify the premise that vice and verse are inextricably interwoven.

But against that gloomy assumption, McInerny offers evidence that it’s virtue that inspires life’s truly great masterpieces.

“It is a Romantic notion that the artist is exempt from ordinary moral rules. However tragic his personal life, however depraved his morals, the art that results is taken to be the justification of vice,” McInerny comments. “Tell it to Dante. Tell it to Browning or Wordsworth. Tell it to the Marines.”

— Tom McFeely