Baby Remember My Name

There is a fleeting moment in Bright Star, Jane Campion's quietly powerful film chronicling the last year or so of John Keats' life, when the poet reports that two people wrote glowing reviews of his new collection of poems. They were both friends of his, he is careful to mention. Then there were a handful of mixed appraisals and "four hostile" notices. Someone listening to this account, trying to be encouraging, asks Keats if that means it's selling well then, and there is an awkward silence.

It was an eerily familiar set of events, a conversation I've seen play out among well-meaning strangers to the new music community in multiple scenarios. Now, of course, the people in the movie theater knew going in that Keats would die young, feeling like a failure, but that eventually he would come to be respected as one of the great poets of the Romantic age (and if they didn't already know it, it would be pointed out to them before the closing credits). But it got me thinking about the divide between the composers I know today who are hoping for a similar immortality/recognition of their genius after the fact, and those not expecting anything of the sort. It's not a hard and fast line, of course, but there's a break around maybe age 35. I wonder if as people age and start sensing their own mortality they necessarily change their tune on hoped-for success past death, or if it's an external societal thing--a shift we might attribute to the digital age. Along with our shrinking hope for the scope of potential fame, has the ephemerality of "content" made us skeptical about the lifeline of our art?