Abstract
For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. (Plato, Ion)
James Whitehead’s Madness and the Romantic Poet: A Critical History is critical in two senses of the word: it provides a sceptical account of the genesis, evolution, and mythologization of what he refers to as the image of ‘the Romantic mad poet’, while also detailing the history of critical attitudes and beliefs that surrounded and shaped this complex and paradoxical image – one ‘marked’, in Whitehead’s words, ‘by fundamental double-sidedness’ (p. 2). Associated with an abyss of contradictory meanings, the figure of the mad poet was, for example, at once exalted as representative of the epitome of individual genius and creativity and condemned as a symbol of the dissolution of reason and order.
Beginning in classical antiquity, Whitehead’s study traces the permutations of this fraught concept as it moved through the centuries, reaching its pinnacle in the nineteenth century when it was transmitted and popularized through literary biography, periodical reviews (such as the Anti-Jacobin Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine), and medical and pseudo-medical writing. As the author points out, ‘there has been no sustained account dealing with the development of the image of the Romantic mad poet … and the possibilities and pitfalls of the role’ (p. 4); Whitehead’s meticulous study fills this critical gap in knowledge. Unlike other works on creativity and madness, this book explores the ways in which the idea of the Romantic mad poet emerged from specific historical moments and from the conversations and debates that distinguished those moments. It is a genealogy of the formation of a literary identity, the indeterminacy of which is illimitably seductive.
The originality of Whitehead’s study lies in its appeal to an array of audiences. Far-reaching and interdisciplinary, it is of interest to those working in the medical humanities as well as to literary theorists and literature enthusiasts (especially in its examination of poetry, literary criticism and biography); to historians of psychiatry and those interested in the history of madness (particularly in its historical account of the rise of psychological approaches to poetry); to clinicians (in its discussion of the history of psychiatry and medicine and its explanation of how these disciplines affected and altered the cultural, social and literary meanings of madness); and to historians in general (given that it is, at its heart, a cultural history). Those interested in arts therapy, however, will not find a discussion of the therapeutic value of creativity. Although Whitehead acknowledges that ‘there are many good reasons to argue for the fundamental therapeutic importance of creative activity’, he admits that such a discussion is beyond ‘the scope of [his] book’ (p. 9). In absorbing and elegant prose, he explores the multitude of perspectives (literary, psychological, philosophical, historical, medical, political, religious) on the long-existing link between poetry and madness, ensuring that his study will pique the interest of a readership as diversified as the perspectives he details.
Central to Whitehead’s account of poetic madness is Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (1961). Indeed, through his study, Whitehead attempts to ‘make a case for the continued need for a Foucauldian intellectual inheritance and methodology in the analysis of the Romantic mad poet’ (p. 14). The book also contributes to existing scholarship related to the topic, including Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony (1930), Lionel Trilling’s Art and Neurosis (1945), historian Sander Gilman’s Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (1985), sociologist George Becker’s The Mad Genius Controversy (1978) – which Whitehead criticizes for ‘pay[ing]’ little ‘attention to literary qualities and contexts’ (p. 11), and which his study seeks to redress – and the work of cultural historian George Rousseau and sociologist Andrew Scull.
Whitehead locates the birth of the figure of the mad poet in classical antiquity, with particular reference to Plato, Aristotle and Horace and their influence on the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He then moves through the early modern period, looking to Ficino, Torquato Tasso (described as ‘an emblematic figure of the suffering poet’; p. 43), Robert Burton and Shakespeare – who, Whitehead argues, was the ‘most important antecedent for Romantic discussion’ of the mad poet, and whose famous passage about the poetic imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is worth quoting here: ‘The lunatick, the louer and the Poet / Are of imagination all compact. . . . The Poets eye, in fine frenzy, rolling, / Doth glance from heauen to earth, from earth to heauen. / And as imagination bodies forth / The formes of things vnknowne: the Poets penne / Turnes them to shapes …’ (p. 44). Notably, Whitehead explains that although this passage was influential for the Romantic era’s understanding of the mad poet, it is actually ‘spoken as part of an attack on illusion, and in censure of the imagination’, and it was ‘germane to the notion of the dangers of unrestrained imagination to health, increasingly popular through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (especially for the radical feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) in both her political treatises and her fiction; p. 45).
Whitehead’s historical account of the representations of and philosophical, literary and cultural responses to poetic madness thus reveals the complicated nature of the nineteenth-century’s inheritance of the notion of the mad poet, intertwined and entangled as it was with the proximate terms emotion, enthusiasm, insanity, genius, inspiration, imagination and creativity. This diversity of interpretations and definitions persists into the eighteenth century. Through prospect poetry as well as the works of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, William Collins and William Cowper (themselves identified as mad), and Charlotte Smith, for whom the figure of the mad poet could only ‘be summoned … through spiralling paradox and negation’ (p. 63), Whitehead shows ‘the horizon of possibilities for writing about poetic madness and the mad poet’ (p. 72), further delineating the manifold meanings associated with these charged concepts.
Also central to Whitehead’s book is a discussion of the influence of medicine and psychiatry on the Romantic era’s notion of the mad poet (and vice versa) and of the role of contemporary periodical reviews and literary biographies, which at once castigated and celebrated this figure. Similarly, the Romantic writers William Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Blake, William Hazlitt, Shelley, John Keats, Byron and John Clare, some of whom were themselves considered mad, either praised or protested this image, imparting their own unique perspectives on it through their works. Whitehead’s comprehensive cultural history shows how the nineteenth century, through reviews, biographies, medical writing and poetry itself, reformed, reconstructed and, in some instances, rejected earlier ideas surrounding poetic madness to ultimately create its own distinct image. This Romantic re-rendering of the image of the mad poet, as Whitehead so adeptly illustrates, has persisted into the twentieth century, influencing modern psychological studies and critical discourse and thus speaking to Romanticism’s powerful and enduring legacy.