As a reader of arts criticism, there’s a decent chance that maybe after discovering John Keats or “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” or maybe, disquietingly, at some more recent point in your life, you’ve wondered: Would it be worth dying horrifically young if it meant you could produce even a single work of art that survives for centuries after you do? Would that be a life wasted, or a life realized?

The latter possibility has its comforts. After all, the idea that artistic genius invites a potentially lethal battery of consequences is an ancient and durable one. A falsely reassuring, Orphean myth of self-sacrifice accompanies every Christopher Marlowe or Kurt Cobain: Early death was the price for their art, and naturally, it was one worth paying, for posterity at least. Artists themselves seem to buy into this. The Notorious B.I.G.’s magnum opus is entitled “Ready to Die.” Yukio Mishima supposedly wrote the searing final page of his Sea of Fertility novels the same day he committed seppuku.