Genius

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. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, "Citizen Kane", at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a year [blank] his late twenties, culminating, at the [blank] of thirty-two, with "Moby-Dick". Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the [blank] of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" ("I grow old ... I grow old")? Twenty-three. "Poets peak young," the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of "Flow", agrees: "The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young." According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading [blank] on creativity, "Lyric poetry is a domain where [blank] is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age."