The poem at the center of Thomas’s study, “A Corona for Vivien,” by Francis Blundy, is a motif that supports the theme of Dispelling the Myth of the Great Artist. Symbolically, the poem represents Francis’s legacy and its relationship to cultural imagination. In the first chapter of the novel, Thomas presents the poem as a lost masterwork. Its defining characteristic is the fact that only one copy of the poem is known to have existed since the night of its debut at the Second Immortal Dinner. In the absence of the poem, the public at large relies on impressions of the poem’s first audience to shape their understanding of the poem’s content. Later in the novel, it is revealed that the dinner guests exaggerated or misrepresented the content of the poem to the press, lionizing Francis in order to save face.

Francis’s reputation evolves, and he becomes seen as an icon for the environmentalist movement and for monogamous love, contradicting the facts of his life. Thomas reveals that Francis vehemently denied climate change, a view he expressed on the same evening he debuted his poem. Similarly, it is difficult to frame Francis as a champion of monogamy when it is openly known that Francis was having an affair with Vivien while she was still married to Percy Greene. In this way, McEwan highlights the disparity between reputation and fact: The popular idea surrounding an object seldom matches the truth about that object’s true nature.

This is cemented by the revelation that the poem is less of a gift to Vivien than it is an ode to Francis’s cunning as a poet and as an amoral figure. Toward the end of the novel, Vivien realizes that the poem depicts Percy’s murder, and she becomes resentful of its existence. Vivien destroys the poem to prevent Francis from controlling Percy’s memory, though this unwittingly grows the poem’s mystique in the popular imagination. It takes Thomas’s scholarly efforts and Vivian’s memoir to correct the public record and dispel the myth of the great artist by revealing his human failings.