FROM AN ESSAY ON PSYCHIATRISTS

XX. PERORATION, CONCERNING GENIUS

Odd that so many writers, makers of films,

Artists, all suitors of excellence consult

Psychiatrists, willing to risk that therapy, easing

The anguish, might smooth away the cicatrice

Of genius, too. But it is all bosh, the false

Link between genius and sickness,

Except perhaps as they were linked

By the Old Man, addressing his class

On the first day: “I know why you are here.

You are here to laugh. You have heard of a crazy

Old man who believes that Robert Bridges

Was a good poet; who believes that Fulke

Greville was a great poet, greater than Philip

Sidney; who believes that Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Are not all that they are cracked up to be … Well,

I will tell you something: I will tell you

What this course is about. Sometime in the middle

Of the Eighteenth Century, along with the rise

Of capitalism and scientific method, the logical

Foundations of Western thought decayed and fell apart.

When they fell apart, poets were left

With emotions and experiences, and with no way

To examine them. At this time, poets and men

Of genius began to go mad. Gray went mad. Collins

Went mad. Kit Smart was mad. William Blake surely

Was a madman. Coleridge was a drug addict, with severe

Depression. My friend Hart Crane died mad. My friend

Ezra Pound is mad. But you will not go mad; you will grow up

To become happy, sentimental old college professors,

Because they were men of genius, and you

Are not; and the ideas which were vital

To them are mere amusement to you. I will not

Go mad, because I have understood those ideas…”

He drank wine and smoked his pipe more than he should;

In the end his doctors in order to prolong life

Were forced to cut away most of his tongue.

That was their business. As far as he was concerned

Suffering was life’s penalty; wisdom armed one

Against madness; speech was temporary; poetry was truth.