The Poet and the Madman

[Ando]

I thought this excerpt would generate some pretty interesting discussion. What is the nature of madness and how does it relate to both the fantastic and the reasonable? The connection to theology is much further down the road, but I've learned that on this board the foundations must be carefully laid or the conversation quickly goes sour. For anyone interested in the rest of the book, it can be found in free E-text format from a number of sites. Just Google it and you'll find it.

Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

-G.K. Chesterton (from "Orthodoxy")

[indigobusiness]

1. I thought this excerpt would generate some pretty interesting discussion

Give it time.

:yourock:

[vixengrl]

2. I think one needs to be logical to an extent to create literary art.

I guess I limit my comment to "literary art" because of Van Gogh and because I don't know as much about visual arts as I do the literary arts. But poetry, I would say, has to be specifically logical, if only because it has to scan. Prose, even, can be quite daft, in the sense that madmen ramble, and may string together endless words. But a poet chooses a theme, chooses a voice, chooses certain rhythms--has a toolbox. A poet may invoke something irrational: fire, wrath, the muses, the gods; but what the poet attempts to do is wrest the irrational into the finite work of his theme. The startling imagery does not exist except to do the work of showing something the poet wants to tell. It's really a discipline. I suppose I could be contradicted by peole who do find some unwell people who write potry--but my question would be, "Is it good?" I think Jack the Ripper might have attached doggerel to some of his victims, but he didn't publish very widely, for all I know.

But this calls to mind for me two thoughts I had this week, that kind of relate to this notion about creativity and sanity. The first thing has to do with the mudane being more horrible than the fantastical. I wondered, in the wake of the tsunami, about the people keeping count. You know what I mean. The people who tally up the bodies, who collect the data we see in the news. The people who have to use this particular information to rather logical and practical things like order body bags and stretchers. These people, even if they dealt only with the numbers and names, must be going through hell. The every day can be terrible.

The second thought I had that relates is about how art doesn't so much seep into life. I've been reading Stephen King's books lately. I read a bunch of 'em when I was in high school and college, and then got busy and couldn't keep up. But my husband had a trove of them that he brought home from his parents', so I could catch up. And it occured to me, especially after reading "On Writing"--that the Master of Horror--whose job has involved nightmares and bringing the irrational to life on the page, is probably one of the most well-adjusted guys out there. And he wrote about how writing pulled him out of rough patches. In a way, the pen (or word processor, or laptop) is a tool to puncture demons with.