We live in a mad, mad world. If you don’t believe me, just watch the news tonight to see the full gamut of insanity on display. From low tragedy to high farce, politics, economics and celebrity culture all seem to be locked in a downward spiral of lunatic proportions. It’s enough to drive a poet to despair.
Mind you, this is no new thing. In the 18th century, a poet like Christopher Smart could be driven to the asylum by virtue of religious experiences that were at odds with the dictates of the rational fashion of the time. His contemporaries considered that, by virtue of their resistance to reason, the insane were a danger to society and should be held in isolation – so it was with Smart. During the six years he spent in mental health asylums, he wrote most of his very best poetry, including the wonderful Jubilate Agno, which sees the poet turn inwards for his inspiration, ignoring the bedlam of his surroundings and making poetry of Orphic power.
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl famously begins: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” and was dedicated to Carl Solomon, a writer Ginsberg met and befriended in a mental asylum. In the litany that opens the poem, these “best minds” are the outsiders, those that society considers mentally ill (echoing Smart’s experience), but who for the poet represent the vital creative force in America. It’s not the people who are mad – it’s the country.
Writing 30 years before Howl, Ginsberg’s mentor William Carlos Williams reached a similar conclusion in To Elsie, a poem that opens: “The pure products of America / Go crazy”. However, Williams’s outsiders are not the artists and dreamers that Ginsberg celebrates but “ordinary” Americans – the rootless who lack a sustaining culture and hold cheap aspirations. It is these factors that drive them mad, their displaced materialism the root of their illness.
Unlike Ginsberg, Williams’s experience of mental illness was very much second hand. Other poets had a much more direct involvement to draw on in their work. One such was Anne Sexton, who had serious depression for most of her life. In Flee on Your Donkey, Sexton turns voluntarily to hospital as a place of refuge, a place where “everyone talks to his own mouth / That’s what it means to be crazy”. But she is not content to be a victim of her condition and prefers to question it, to try to understand what she is going through.
Rosemary Tonks’s mental and physical health problems ultimately let her to abandon literature for fundamentalist Christianity and a life of isolation. In The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas, she shows early signs of that disillusionment and captures beautifully what used to be called “nerves”, the result of extreme sensory overload:
I have lived it, and I know too much.
My café-nerves are breaking me
With black, exhausting information.
In Northumberland House, Stevie Smith’s chance encounter with a nice old lady on a bus becomes a study in difference; the sensitive child, withdrawn, just a bit too good, becomes the confused resident of a mental hospital in old age. Smith adds to the confusion by conflating the 19th-century institution with the Jacobean London home of the Percy family, which also went by the name Northumberland House. You can’t help but wonder if she knew that the hospital’s most famous patient was TS Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood.
I am also tempted to believe that Smith would have agreed with Emily Dickinson’s sentiments in Much Madness is Divinest Sense. Dickinson points out that so much of what we consider normal is quite mad, and vice versa. The difference between the two is just a social construct, the consensus opinion of our society. This, in turn, may explain why it is we agree to live in a world gone mad; we simply fail to realise it.
And so, this month you are invited to contribute poems on the subject of madness in all its guises. Whether you write from personal experience or from observation, it’s an issue that has touched most of us in one way or another. Please share your poems here.
