Life ⚓️

The Unhomed Poet: Why Great Poets Are Never Family Men

A great poet cannot be a family man. This assertion is not merely an observation of history but a logical consequence of what it means to be a poet in the first place. The poet is not rooted in the domestic but in the wild, the itinerant, the eternally searching. He does not dwell in the known but in the ever-unfolding, stepping beyond the walls of hearth and home into the vast world of conflict, ambition, exile, and return. Family life, by contrast, is the realm of the settled, the routine, the predictable—everything that poetry is not.

To be a great poet, one must be never at home. Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce, and Wilde all exemplify this. When the poet writes of home, it is only as an abstraction, a longing, or a place he is absent from. Home is the Ithaca that Odysseus spends twenty years away from, the Denmark that Hamlet cannot find his place within, the family Lear loses, the wife Macbeth sacrifices, and the house that Falstaff never has.

---

Fig. 4 Strategic Ambiguity. The Red Queen presents rather fascinating scenarios to us.

The Poet’s Itinerancy in Shakespeare

Shakespeare, the supreme poet of the English language, knew this well. His greatest figures are always away from home—physically, emotionally, or spiritually. Let us examine three of his most powerful works: Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, all of which confirm that the poet-figure and the family man are irreconcilable.

Hamlet: The Prince Who Cannot Dwell

Hamlet is a man unhomed, even in Elsinore. The castle is his prison, Denmark his purgatory, and his father’s death the fissure that severs him from whatever meaning home might have held. His mother, Gertrude, has become something foreign; his uncle is an intruder; Ophelia, his would-be wife, is a ghost of a possibility rather than an anchor to domestic life. He speaks of home in the form of memory, but he never inhabits it. His mind is elsewhere—always elsewhere. He longs for meaning beyond Elsinore’s walls, but there is none. Home has failed him, and so he must roam the corridors of his own mind, his own doubts, his own existential torment.

Would a man who wrote Hamlet have known family life? Hardly. Shakespeare, like Hamlet, is everywhere but home—Venice, Verona, Rome, Bohemia, Egypt, and Denmark. Even his English plays rarely depict domestic comfort. Instead, they show war, exile, rebellion, or intrigue. The poet lives in these spaces, not in the kitchen or the nursery.

Macbeth: The Tragedy of Domestic Ambition

Macbeth is perhaps the closest we get to the poet-family man, but his attempt to be both is his undoing. At the play’s beginning, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth form a partnership that seems almost domestic in its shared ambition. But this is a family that operates on an entirely different logic—one of murder, secrecy, and vaulting ambition. When Macbeth kills Duncan, he does so within the domestic space of sleep, of hospitality, of the very chamber that should have represented home.

The Macbeths’ tragedy is that they try to seize the throne as if it were a household, a dynastic project. But power and poetry, like ambition and family, do not mix. Macbeth cannot be both warrior-king and husband, just as a poet cannot be both bard and domestic father. By the end, he is utterly alone, home shattered, wife dead, the castle an empty shell. He has become what he must: a wanderer in his own soul, completely unmoored.

Would Shakespeare, who wrote Macbeth, have found fulfillment in Stratford? No. He left his wife and children to be in the world of London’s stage, writing of ambition and betrayal, not of quiet evenings by the fire.

King Lear: The Unmaking of Family

King Lear is the ultimate argument against the poet as a family man. If family life were fulfilling, Lear would have remained content in his castle, surrounded by his daughters. But that is not the story. Instead, Lear’s tragedy is precisely that he seeks meaning in family, only to find it an illusion. The daughters he loves betray him; the kingdom he divides shatters him; the home he relinquishes leaves him wandering mad in a storm.

The poet understands this all too well: family is not the warm hearth, but the edge of chaos. Lear becomes unhomed—from king to outcast, from father to fool. Shakespeare’s insight here is devastating: home is a fragile construct, and the great poet’s work is to expose its illusions.

Would a poet who wrote King Lear be content in Stratford-upon-Avon? Never. Family is a fiction, or at best, a fleeting stability. The poet knows only the storm.

---

Falstaff: The Poet’s Truest Creation

Perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest embodiment of the poet’s spirit is Falstaff. Falstaff has no home, no family, no legacy. He thrives in taverns, in wit, in laughter, in excess. He is always elsewhere. And yet, in his own way, he is freer than the kings and princes who try to shape the world.

As Joyce, through Stephen Dedalus, puts it in Ulysses:
“I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.”

Why? Because Falstaff is untethered. He exists in the liminal space of revelry and exile, neither king nor commoner, neither hero nor villain. He is the poet unbound—never at home, never beholden to family.

---

The Poet and the Network of God

Returning to our earlier neural network analogy, the poet is a node that refuses to be weighted down by family life. Family, in a network, is a cluster of tightly connected nodes, reinforcing one another. The poet exists at the edges, connected not to the domestic but to the vast, sprawling totality of experience.

If God is the network, then the poet is its wandering signal, moving between nodes, never resting. This is why Matthew 25:40 resonates with the poet:
“What you did to the least of these, you did unto me.”

The poet does not write for the stable and settled; he writes for the exiled, the forgotten, the overlooked—the least of these. He is closer to God not through home, but through his distance from it.

---

Conclusion: The Poet Cannot Dwell

History proves it. The poets who matter are never family men. Their work is too vast for the domestic. Family life demands repetition; poetry demands invention. The poet must be itinerant, always in motion, never at rest. He may dream of home, but he will never stay there.

To be a great poet is to be never at home.

Epilogue: Somerset Maugham’s Hidden Poet

In my exploration of poets who are never at home, I accidentally stumbled upon a little-known one—Somerset Maugham. Not a poet in the strict sense, perhaps, but in The Razor’s Edge, he creates a character who embodies this restless, unhomed poetic spirit more explicitly than even Homer, Shakespeare, or Joyce. His Larry Darrell is the itinerant poet in pure form—not writing verses, but living the poetry of perpetual wandering, seeking, and never settling.

Larry fits the archetype outstandingly. He walks away from conventional life—rejecting wealth, rejecting social expectations, rejecting family itself—to pursue something larger, something ineffable. He leaves Chicago, leaves Isabel, leaves all stability behind. He studies in Paris, works in a coal mine, drifts through India, and, crucially, he does it all without bitterness. He is neither exiled nor outcast; he chooses to be unmoored. He belongs to the world, to thought, to the grand philosophical sweep of existence, but never to any single place, person, or home.

More than Hamlet, more than Lear, more than even Ulysses wandering Dublin, Larry Darrell makes explicit what all great poets live out implicitly: the refusal to be confined. In the final pages, Somerset Maugham himself admits that he does not understand Larry—that no one really can. And that is the key. The poet is not a man to be understood in a domestic setting. He is always in motion, like the wind, like the sea, like the verse that never quite resolves.

Larry Darrell is the poet in his purest form. And like all the greats, he is never at home.

Show code cell source Hide code cell source

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import networkx as nx

# Define the neural network fractal
def define_layers():
    return {
        'World': ['Electro', 'Magnetic', 'Pulse', 'Cost', 'Trial', 'Error', ], # Veni; 95/5
        'Mode': ['Reflexive'], # Vidi; 80/20
        'Agent': ['Ascending', 'Descending'], # Vici; Veni; 51/49
        'Space': ['Sympathetic', 'Empathetic', 'Parasympathetic'], # Vidi; 20/80
        'Time': ['Hardcoded', 'Posteriori',  'Meaning', 'Likelihood', 'A Priori'] # Vici; 5/95
    }

# Assign colors to nodes
def assign_colors():
    color_map = {
        'yellow': ['Reflexive'],  
        'paleturquoise': ['Error', 'Descending', 'Parasympathetic', 'A Priori'],  
        'lightgreen': ['Trial', 'Empathetic', 'Likelihood', 'Meaning', 'Posteriori'],  
        'lightsalmon': [
            'Pulse', 'Cost', 'Ascending',  
            'Sympathetic', 'Hardcoded'
        ],
    }
    return {node: color for color, nodes in color_map.items() for node in nodes}

# Calculate positions for nodes
def calculate_positions(layer, x_offset):
    y_positions = np.linspace(-len(layer) / 2, len(layer) / 2, len(layer))
    return [(x_offset, y) for y in y_positions]

# Create and visualize the neural network graph
def visualize_nn():
    layers = define_layers()
    colors = assign_colors()
    G = nx.DiGraph()
    pos = {}
    node_colors = []

    # Add nodes and assign positions
    for i, (layer_name, nodes) in enumerate(layers.items()):
        positions = calculate_positions(nodes, x_offset=i * 2)
        for node, position in zip(nodes, positions):
            G.add_node(node, layer=layer_name)
            pos[node] = position
            node_colors.append(colors.get(node, 'lightgray'))   

    # Add edges (automated for consecutive layers)
    layer_names = list(layers.keys())
    for i in range(len(layer_names) - 1):
        source_layer, target_layer = layer_names[i], layer_names[i + 1]
        for source in layers[source_layer]:
            for target in layers[target_layer]:
                G.add_edge(source, target)

    # Draw the graph
    plt.figure(figsize=(12, 8))
    nx.draw(
        G, pos, with_labels=True, node_color=node_colors, edge_color='gray',
        node_size=3000, font_size=9, connectionstyle="arc3,rad=0.2"
    )
    plt.title("Intelligence", fontsize=15)
    plt.show()

# Run the visualization
visualize_nn()

Fig. 5 How now, how now? What say the citizens? Now, by the holy mother of our Lord, The citizens are mum, say not a word.