There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.

The passage contrasts an older romantic myth of the poet—young, doomed, and canonized, typically imagined as male—with a newer cultural script in which “genius” and tragic destiny are projected onto a woman. Wolfe’s phrasing suggests a shift not only in who is permitted to occupy the role of “poet,” but in how celebrity, suffering, and artistic authority are gendered. The tone is elegiac and slightly polemical: it implies that the traditional male-coded figure of the poet has been displaced, and that the culture now seeks its emblem of grandeur and fatality in a female “child of genius.”