I use my real name more online since I’ve begun consulting, but I used to mostly go by VerseFameBeauty. (If the username SarahFowler is taken, I often still do… it’s my Words With Friends handle, for instance.) People ask all the time where I got the concept, so here once and for all is the name’s origin: a couple of lines I love (emphasis mine) from a [rather whiny and depressing] poem by John Keats.
Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell
Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell:
No god, no demon of severe response,
Deigns to reply from heaven or from hell.
Then to my human heart I turn at once–
Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone;
Say, wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain!
O darkness! darkness! ever must I moan,
To question heaven and hell and heart in vain!
Why did I laugh? I know this being’s lease–
My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads:
Yet could I on this very midnight cease,
And the world’s gaudy ensigns see in shreds.
Verse, fame, and beauty are intense indeed,
But death intenser–death is life’s high meed.
– As printed in Essential Keats: Selected by Philip Levine (Essential Poets)