Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, July 18th, 2025.

Today's poem is by Robert Graves.

It's a short, witty number called Epitaph on an unfortunate artist.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.

Epitaph on an unfortunate artist.

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits.

This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid. So in the end, he could not change the

tragic habits this formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

Short and sweet, a cautionary tale about popular art, or rather art that is conceived in order

to be popular. And this is a tragic fate that befalls not just artists, but publishers,

filmmakers, theologians, pseudo-intellectuals, teachers, psychologists, etc., etc.

And the poem is not necessarily the story of someone who started out doing hack work,

but of someone who began doing something genuine or spontaneous,

and then began making money doing that thing and was trapped,

right, unwilling to give up their newfound economic success in order to experiment, to change,

to look back years down the road and realize they had been in error and to backtrack

or correct themselves or print a retraction or to stop drawing the comic rabbits. I think of poor

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was finally so tired of Sherlock Holmes that he killed him off.

But there was so much public outcry that he brought him back to life again.

If you are an artist, my prayer for you is that you would never become as unfortunate as this one.

Here's the poem one more time.

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