In this sketch from Monty Python’s 1973 album, “Matching Tie and Handkerchief,” a crowd gathers to watch Thomas Hardy begin his latest novel, The Return of the Native, while an announcer provides a running commentary.
Here’s poet Wislawa Szymborska in her Nobel Lecture, talking about how the lives of artists or scientists can make great films, but not poets:
But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens … Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?
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