It’s still true that there’s no other kind of artist, at least no other kind of successful one. I didn’t go back and read the old thread, but if it’s supposed there that Whitman was some kind of worldly figure who actually was out and about doing anything in society (other than maybe his nursing duties during the civil war) whoever thinks that would be dead wrong. And in fact, Yeats, being essentially what we today call a ‘public intellectual,’ a constant writer of articles and editor of volumes, a widely traveled man with friends across the world, a senator of the nascent Irish state, ultimately the living representative of Ireland itself to the rest of the people of the globe, was a far more active and worldly man than the retiring, absolutely introverted Whitman, who spent the last 30 years of his life as a tourist destination. Although each certainly tried to give the public the wrong impression, as the requirements of his poetic stance dictated.
However, no artist ever lasted based on his worldly pursuits, successful or not. The closest thing we have is probably… I can’t think of an artist who is well-known to us the quality of whose actions overshadows the art. Although if you were to asked Yeats, he would say Oscar Wilde, whom he saw as a frustrated man of action, who had to resort to writing (in fact, so would have Wilde, who said ‘I saved my art for life’ when asked why he hadn’t written a masterpiece [of course he had, in addition to his brilliant critical writings]). Cases like Byron and Hemingway don’t hold, because the stories of their doings are 1.) largely self-mythologizing and 2.) aren’t better than their art.
This doesn’t mean that the great artists were all wilting violets, but they’ve almost entirely been basically sedentary types who are intensely focused on their art. Take Hemingway for example, who for all the bravado, ended his life as a cat lady, rising early and ascending a tower to assemble minutiae.
