Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry: 1825-1855, by Joseph Crawford

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry: 1825–1855 by Joseph Crawford Max Cavitch (bio) Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry: 1825–1855, by Joseph Crawford; pp. vii + 248. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $59.99, $44.99 ebook, €51.99, €42.79 ebook. “Mad poets” leap and sprawl throughout literary history in innumerable guises, sometimes fitted out for idealization and acclamation, often for notoriety and institutionalization (3). [End Page 437] In the annals of medicine, they are subjected to diagnostic, etiological, and prescriptive speculations and pronouncements. Well into the modern era, Platonic notions of supernatural possession were invoked as a defense against various charges and diagnoses of what we would call psychopathology. However, by the late eighteenth century, scientific empiricism, social reformism, and psychiatric professionalization had begun radically to transform Western attitudes toward mental illness and, consequently, the relation between poetic inspiration and insanity—the subject of Joseph Crawford’s Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry: 1825–1855, which focuses on early Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. Crawford sees Tennyson and Browning moving away from the Shelleyan visionary enthusiasm of their youthful productions, relinquishing their devotion to a Romantic style as it became both vehicle for and subject of intensifying psychological scrutiny. On one hand, dream, vision, prophecy, revelation; on the other hand, hallucination, delusion, melancholy, hypersensitivity, madness. Both poets, Crawford observes, recognized that the poet’s “self-declared elevation above the mundane” increasingly was suspected of being “a deliberate self-exile from the ‘rational,’” or even an unwilled descent into the irrational (60). Poetry that reveled too fully in imagination, undisciplined by reason, might be regarded not as the work of transcendent genius, but as the ravings of lunacy. Crawford argues that, in a climate that was turning hostile to Romanticism, Browning strategically distanced himself from the poetry of unregulated inspiration by objectifying madness in dramatic forms, making it more difficult to identify his own subjectivity with the imaginative excesses and psychological aberrations of various characters and personae, such as the speaker of “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836). Tennyson, meanwhile, interlarded his depictions of imaginative excess and psychological aberration with deep skepticism and ceaseless self-questioning, as in “The Two Voices” (1842). With Tennyson and Browning, Crawford implies, the post-Romantic “visionary company” self-consciously embraced its own neurotic tendencies, so as not to be charged with something much worse (Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry [Doubleday & Company]). Crawford argues that these poets’ preoccupation with the struggle to distinguish between poetic imagination and madness was a crucial factor in their development. He makes them stand-ins for idealists of many stripes who were put on the defensive by the tendency of modern psychiatry to pathologize the supposedly divine madness of outlandish poetic visions, altered states of consciousness, heightened or acute perception, dreams and hypnagogic states, and other aberrant or excessive poetic effusions. Yet Crawford’s history gives scant attention to the fact that many psychiatrists were beginning to recognize the diagnostic, therapeutic, and even artistic value of imaginative writing by their patients. During the period covered by this study of British poetry (an inflated term for its slim range of poets and poems), “inspiration and insanity” constituted no simple opposition. Nor were psychiatry and aesthetics entirely separate disciplines; in the early nineteenth century, they were interanimating spheres of inquiry, linked by their shared fascination with the psychology of imagination. In the 1830s, the rise of the very broad concept of “moral insanity” further complicated rigid distinctions between organic illness and counter-normative forms of thinking regarded as disturbing or dangerous according to the era’s religious and legal norms (84). [End Page 438] Crawford correctly observes that early nineteenth-century psychiatrists were making significant discoveries regarding delusional and chaotic thinking; psychogenic maladies and the effects of neurological damage were becoming much better understood. And it is easy to imagine poets feeling chastened in their enthusiasms by new evidence of the many ways in which the mind could be compromised by mental illness. However, there is a sizeable difference between explaining something and explaining it away. As Browning writes, “the world is not to be learned and thrown aside” (qtd. in Crawford 219). For us...