'But Man Is Not Born for Happiness'

“[P]oets are a very worthless, wicked set of people.” 

How did William Cowper, himself a fine and neglected poet, come to this conclusion? In a letter to Rev. John Newton, written March 15, 1784, Cowper tells his friend he has just finished reading the eight volumes of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81). It includes critical/biographical profiles of fifty-two poets, most of whom lived in the eighteenth century, an age rich in “Mad Poets” – William Collins, Christopher Smart, Thomas Chatterton, William Blake and Cowper himself. Here is the context in his letter to Newton:

 

“In all that number I observe but one man—a poet of no great fame—of whom I did not know that he existed till I found him there, whose mind seems to have had the slightest tincture of religion; and he was hardly in his senses. His name was Collins. He sank into a state of melancholy, and died young. Not long before his death he was found at his lodgings in Islington, by his biographer, with the New Testament in his hand. He said to Johnson, ‘I have but one book, but it is the best.’ Of him, therefore, there are some hopes. But from the lives of all the rest there is but one inference to be drawn—that poets are a very worthless, wicked set of people.”

 

Cowper (1731-1800), a veteran of suicide attempts and multiple confinements to the mad house, takes a moralistic view of madness. He understands his depressive disorder and periodic abatement of it in terms of his relation to God. Madness meant he was being punished, condemned to hell. In his “Life of Collins,” Johnson is empathetic and forgiving:

 

“He designed many works, but his great fault was irresolution, or the frequent calls of immediate necessity broke his schemes, and suffered him to pursue no settled purpose. A man, doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation or remote enquiries.”

 

Johnson generalizes from Collins’ case: “But man is not born for happiness. Collins, who, while he ‘studied to live,’ felt no evil but poverty, no sooner ‘lived to study’ than his life was assailed by more dreadful calamities, disease and insanity.”

 

Johnson, of course, had his own “mental health issues.” In his Life, in a passage dated 1729, the year Johnson turned thirty, Boswell makes a distinction between melancholy and madness:

 

“The powers of his great mind might be troubled, and their full exercise suspended at times; but the mind itself was ever entire. As a proof of this, it is only necessary to consider, that, when he was at the very worst, he composed that state of his own case, which shewed an uncommon vigour, not only of fancy and taste, but of judgement. I am aware that he himself was too ready to call such a complaint by the name of madness; in conformity with which notion, he has traced its gradations, with exquisite nicety, in one of the chapters of his Rasselas [1759]. But there is surely a clear distinction between a disorder which affects only the imagination and spirits, while the judgement is sound, and a disorder by which the judgement itself is impaired.”

In those pre-psychiatric days, diagnoses were not medically rigorous, as we would understand it. It’s sufficient to say Collins, Cowper and the others were “troubled,” not given to buoyant vivacity. Saddest of all is Johnson’s judgment of Collins' poetry:

 

“His lines commonly are of slow motion, clogged and impeded with clusters of consonants. As men are often esteemed who cannot be loved, so the poetry of Collins may sometimes extort praise when it gives little pleasure.”