From The Catholic Thing, Vice and Verse:
Why is it that so many whose personal lives are a shambles are drawn to political activism? Since the agitation is usually for liberal and morally destructive causes, this is perhaps not too puzzling. Millay, Dorothy Parker too, and of course Simone de Beauvoir set out to change the world when they couldn’t get their own house in order.
A few years ago, Paul Johnson wrote a book about the disastrous personal lives of so many who have wanted to prescribe for mankind. He was chided for this. Didn’t he know that personal immorality has nothing to do with public policy? Did he, poor benighted devil, think with Plato that the good ruler must first be a good man?
The notion that vice is the prerequisite for verse, for art generally, is akin to that, I suppose, but do not ask me to lay it out analytically. It is a Romantic notion that the artist is exempt from ordinary moral rules. However tragic his personal life, however depraved his morals, the art that results is taken to be the justification of vice.
Tell it to Dante. Tell it to Browning or Wordsworth. Tell it to the Marines.