Emily Temple Reminds Us of That Time Leonardo DiCaprio Played Arthur Rimbaud

If Wild Nights With Emily has got you thinkin' about other movies depicting the lives of revered poets, check out Emily Temple's list ranking many more. She admits that "[m]ost movies about poets are . . . not great." [It's true, we agree.] Nonetheless, moving on from there: 

Writing is a famously difficult pursuit to capture on screen, and artists in general—but poets in particular—are too often subject to a tender, teary cultural mythologizing that winds up bleeding into their biopics, which means that more often than not, traditional treatments of famous poets wind up being treacly or boring or both. This is not to say that I do not watch them. Or rank them. So, to get you through the middle of your week (no, I won’t say it), I have ranked 16 of them for you to argue about. Sorry, Leo. For the rest of you: enjoy.

16. Total Eclipse (1995)

20-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio as Arthur Rimbaud in a movie about his passionate love affair with Paul Verlaine, who is played by David Thewlis? (As a New York Times writer of the era quipped, “Dead gay poets? Erotic violence? Sounds like a DiCaprio project.”) It simply can’t be bad, right? Well . . . I am sorry but it is terrible.

15. Sylvia (2003)

Unfortunately for Gwyneth Paltrow, who does about as good a job as could be expected, Sylvia Plath fans are not easily sated—and it doesn’t help that Frieda Hughes, Plath’s daughter, refused to allow the BBC to use any of her mother’s poetry in the film, and publicly attacked it as exploitative. Plus, given what we now know about Ted Hughes, what’s really the use of watching a love story with him in it?

We won't give away her #1, so, you can read more at Literary Hub.