“[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.”
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