Madness and the Romantic Poet

Abstract

This book examines writing that has linked poetry and poets to madness, covering early literary criticism, biography, medical literature, and poetry itself, and moving between the late eighteenth and the twentieth century. More specifically, its purpose is to offer an account of the development and dissemination of the figure of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in the nineteenth century, and to show how this figure interacted with coeval ideas about genius or creativity, and the varying fortunes in reception and reputation of Romantic poets, poetry, and conceptions of Romanticism generally. The opening sections address the currency of popular myths on the topic, and the relevance of modern psychological studies on mental illness and creativity. The greater part of the book focuses on reception, broadly conceived, discussing the Romantic conversation with classical and early modern ideas about poetic madness; attitudes towards the creative and literary mind in the psychiatric medicine of the period; contemporary reviews of Romantic poetry, and the hostile rhetoric of insanity they deployed; and life-writing, moving from early brief lives and popular anthologies of the ‘infirmities of genius’ to the larger narratives of irrationality in Victorian literary biography. Figures discussed include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hazlitt, Byron, Lamb, Shelley, and Clare. The book reassesses how Romantic writers both contributed to and resisted the construction of the mad poet, or new and rediscovered mythologies of poetic madness. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered as an image of the artist in modernity, and the image’s long afterlife and importance are explained.