From Dylan Thomas's eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath's desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton's Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats' death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture Novelists can be stable savvy politically adept & in control but poets should be melancholic doomed & self-destructive Is this just an illusion or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry? In this book two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past in part as pilgrims but also as investigators interrogating the myth