Many of us like the idea of being romantic, even once we know something of the term’s breadth. Fewer would be happy to be thought ‘mad’ and the stigma of the term discourages investigation of its wider meanings. Yet madness has since Plato (and no doubt before) been strongly associated with the visionary power for which poets can be valued; and during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the conception of poetic excellence shifted so as to make madness (variously understood) seem a condition for achieving it. This course will examine conceptions of enabling madness in Cowper, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Clare.
One major difficulty in trying to think intelligently about madness is that it tends to be identified, in the first place (and sometimes the last) as a deviation from a cultural norm. Cultures inevitably produce ideas about what constitutes ‘health’ and what forms of behaviour are conducive to it. In cultures dominated by a language in which there is a sharp distinction between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’, madness tends to be understood as form of ‘mental health’ corresponding to ‘physical health’. This basic premise then encourages the transposition from ‘physical medicine’ (which is widely considered more advanced than, say, psychotherapy) of a terminology and set of procedures developed chiefly for ministering to bodily ailments. Thus a person who is considered mad is liable to thought in need of ‘diagnosis’ and a ‘treatment’ for a ‘disorder’ which will restore him or her to ‘mental health’.
Yet the premise is highly questionable, for a variety of reasons. First, we live in a culture where, as the literary critic William Empson once remarked ‘everything is pretty all right because of science’. This piece of irony was not intended to deny the huge benefits we all enjoy as a result of advances in the natural sciences generally and in medicine in particular. It was, however, intended to query the assumption that the most measurable advances are the most valuable ones and that the forms of knowledge characteristic of the natural sciences are in all respects supreme. Aristotle’s precept — intelligence consists in attempting only that kind and degree of exactitude appropriate to the nature of the subject — would have been sufficient caveat in an age which had not marginalized classical learning. Second, not all deviations from a cultural norm are bad, however much they might be resisted. It is very clear now that the motivations of the suffragettes were not insane, though in the 19th century there were those who believed (or said) that they were. It is less clear that ‘schizophrenia’, ‘bi-polar disorder’ and ‘manic depression’ are extremely loose descriptions of the ‘conditions’ to which they are supposed to apply, but there are many in the psychotherapeutic professions who think they are — who believe that such terms can often be a subterfuge from recognizing (for example) that non-compliance may be a valid form of protest. Finally, the situation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was in some ways more primitive than our own. (The lack of a medicalized terminology for madness, however, is not necessarily a disadvantage). The term ‘psychosomatic’, coined by Coleridge in an attempt to heal the false distinction between body and soul, is poorly understood today; among the general public in 1830 (say) it would have been perhaps even more mystifying. Finally, the term ‘psyche’ is in compound words like ‘psychology’ usually understood to mean ‘mind’, thus excluding from the study of the human person religious dimensions of experience which in poetry are often fully registered.
New forms of knowledge are always developing, sometimes in the areas (such as poetry) where they are least expected. All the poets we will be considering were judged by some of their contemporaries (and sometimes by themselves) to be mad. Yet in each case it may be profitable to think of the poetry as embodying modes of experience which seemed crazy only because they departed so flagrantly from the cultural presuppositions of their own era. Instead of thinking, for example, that Blake was subject to hallucinations, might we not, as C S Lewis would have encouraged us to do, take seriously the possibility that his experience transcended some of the perceptual constraints by which others allow themselves to be bound. Instead of thinking that Cowper was subject to ‘persecution mania’ and ‘religious delusion’ might we not consider how his fragility gave him special kinds of alertness, as result of which he developed a language for varying states of consciousness and, with it, established the beginnings of the new epistemology promoted by his poetic successors. If Clare had not been able to imagine himself into the bodies of birds, insects and flowers, he might have been more ‘stable’ but less fully alive.
We start the course by considering the identification, definition, classification and response to madness in our own time and in the history of Western literary culture. We will then examine what is distinctive about the ways in which four poets — Cowper, Blake, Coleridge and Clare — experience the world. Finally we will ask how far these distinctive modes of experience, studied with full respect for the specifically poetic properties of style, depend on a capacity for being mad.
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