Maybe it's better to be a late bloomer...

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.

What happens when an economist sets out to quantify whether genius happens early in life... or later? David Galenson polled a group of literary scholars about what they consider the top poems in the 20th Century American canon.

The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.

I'm starting to feel better about not having a book deal at age 9...
From Late Bloomers by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker.
Art also from the New Yorker.

AND more good reading in the New Yorker:
Sleep by Roddy Doyle.

It was the thing he’d always loved about her. The way she could sleep. When they’d just started going with each other, before they really knew each other, he’d lie awake, hoping she’d wake up, praying for it, dying. But even then he’d loved to look at her while she slept. There was something about it that made him feel lucky, or privileged. Or trusted. She could do that beside him, turn everything off, all the defenses, and let him watch her.