I first read the Prophetic Books of William Blake as an undergraduate. Having previously known Blake only as the author of âThe Lambâ and âThe Tygerâ, they came as something of a shock, and I remember feeling mentally bowled over by the enormously authoritative poetic voice that I encountered in works such as Milton and Jerusalem. When I attempted to share my enthusiasm for Blake with another student, however, his response was damning. After briefly surveying the illuminated books, he concluded that if Blake had been alive today, he would just have been another crazy person writing nonsense manifestos on the internet.
Back then, we undergraduates felt that we knew a thing or two about craziness. Depression, alcoholism, and self-harm were epidemics among us. We knew all about antidepressants and antipsychotics, aspirin overdoses and lithium treatments, counselling sessions and razorblades. We took it for granted that, as sensitive young people studying arts and humanities subjects at university, we would of course be both deeply miserable and slightly mad. In retrospect, Iâm afraid we may secretly have been rather proud of it.
I admired Blake because he seemed so sure that he wasnât mad. I liked the way that he wrote outrageous things, knowing his readers would accuse him of insanity, and then threw those accusations back in their faces, insisting that he was sane and the rest of the world was crazy. His certainty regarding the authenticity of his visions seemed very different from the anxious hesitancy and reflexive irony with which my contemporaries and I tended to express our ideas. I tried to explain this to another of my undergraduate friends, but she frowned and replied: âAre you sure he wasnât on drugs?â
In that time and place, such scepticism was predictable. We thought of ourselves as post-modern intellectual sophisticates: doubt was our bread and butter. But we also assumed that our wary, psychiatrically informed perspective was a distinctively modern one. Years later, when I began to study the early poetry of Browning, Tennyson, and their contemporaries, I was thus surprised to find it marked by very similar traits: an admiration of visionary certainty existing side by side with anxious self-doubt, fears of mental instability, and worries over how (or if) one could distinguish between inspiration and insanity. It was one thing for later Victorians, their faith shaken by Strauss and Darwin, to look askance at would-be poet-prophets. But why did the young poets of the 1830s feel such anxieties, with King William on the throne and Shelley barely cold in his grave? Why did they have so much less confidence in poetic intuition, inspiration, and genius than their immediate predecessors? And why did they all seem to have been so worried about going mad?
This book is my attempt to answer these questions. Its subject is the way in which poetic genius was medicalised and pathologised during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and the impact that this process had upon the development of post-Romantic poetry in Britain, as exemplified by the early works of Browning and Tennyson. From the 1820s onwards, it became increasingly commonplace in Britain for poetic talent to be described in basically medical terms, as a consequence of the unusual physical development of a poetâs brain or nervous systemâa view which brought with it the related belief that such abnormally poetic brains might also be predisposed to malfunction or madness. Yet this period also witnessed the flourishing of âRomanticâ conceptions of poets as inspired visionaries, and it is the relationship between these two apparently opposed modes of understanding poetic genius that this book aims to explore. How could the poet be simultaneously an inspired prophet and a mere case study in atypical neurological development? If poetic talent was associated with both inspired vision and insane hallucination, then how was the would-be poet supposed to tell the two apart?
In the eighteenth century the relationship between poetry and the mental sciences had been much less adversarial, and the interlinked cultures of poetry and psychology that flourished in the 1790s have been ably described in works such as Richardsonâs British Romanticism and the Sciences of the Mind (2001), Faubertâs Rhyming Reason (2009), and Rustonâs Creating Romanticism (2013). I am not the first scholar to note that attitudes towards poetic talent shifted during the post-Romantic period, and in The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (2005), Dino Felluga pointed out that just as poetic ability was persistently linked with melancholy in the eighteenth century, so it came to be connected with madness over the course of the nineteenth century. Felluga linked this change to the ongoing influence of Byron, who was regarded even during his own lifetime as an archetypal âmad poetâ (Felluga 2005, 14â17, 39â41, 108â9, 119â23). The same topic was addressed by James Whitehead in Madness and the Romantic Poet (2017), which declared:
[B]y the turn of the nineteenth century the traditional alignment of genius with the traditional categories of madness, mania, and melancholia, which had descended as protected and even cherished cultural roles from antiquity, was caught up if not entirely overtaken by a more negative medical-moral sense of pathology. (Whitehead 2017, 23â4)
Fellugaâs and Whiteheadâs studies confirm the crucial importance of the early nineteenth century, and especially the 1830s, as a transitional moment in the interlinked histories of genius and mental pathology. Both have been important to the present study, and I am particularly indebted to Whiteheadâs far-ranging analysis of the period. However, my research differs from theirs insofar as my focus is not upon the Romantic poets whose lives and works did so much to bring poetry and insanity together in the British cultural imagination, but upon their immediate successors: the men and women who had to cope with the consequences of British Romanticism, which included both the exaltation of poetic genius and the enduring belief that madness and poetry often went hand in hand.
Of these post-Romantic poets I have focused particularly upon the early careers of Tennyson and Browning, whom Isobel Armstrong identified as the chief representatives of the two main schools of early Victorian avant-garde poetry, exemplars of what she called the âaestheticised politicsâ of the âsubversive conservativeâ Apostles and of the âpoliticised aestheticsâ of the âdissenting and radicalâ Monthly Repository group, respectively (Armstrong 1996, 27â8). According to Armstrongâs classic account, the 1830s saw the rise of the âVictorian double poemâ: a form that Browning and Tennyson helped to create, in which poems that first appear to be works of lyric self-expression reveal themselves to be dramatic works that critique the very ideas and ideals they initially seem to express. As Armstrong writes, the double poem was âa deeply sceptical formâ which, by âseeing utterance both as subject and objectâ, made it âpossible for the poet to explore expressive psychological forms simultaneously as psychological conditions and as constructsâ (Armstrong 1996, 12â19). My argument is that the rise of such âdouble poemsâ needs to be understood in relation to the periodâs increasing pathologisation of poetic geniusâa development which encouraged poets such as Browning and Tennyson to adopt stances of reflexive self-critique within their poems, thus pre-empting the possibility that what seemed to be poetic inspiration might turn out to be insane delusion. Within the double poem, whenever the position of subjective lyric speaker threatens to become untenable, the poet can backflip into the stance of an objective observer instead, repositioning themselves as would-be alienists rather than potential patients.
That Victorian poets were interested in psychology is not, of course, a new insight: and two recent studies, Rick Rylanceâs Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850â1880 (2000) and Gregory Tateâs The Poetâs Mind (2012), have greatly deepened our knowledge of the relationship between Victorian psychology and literature. However, Tate and Rylance are both primarily interested in the theoretical psychology which flourished in Britain after 1850, rather than the medical psychology of the previous generation: and while I learned a great deal from both books, I ultimately found them to be of limited assistance in understanding the relationship between poetry and psychiatry in the 1830s and 1840s. The same emphasis upon the post-1850 period, after the great mid-century consolidation of Victorian medical psychology, can be seen in older works on the subject, such as Colleyâs Tennyson and Madness (1983), Faasâ Retreat into the Mind (1988), and Platizkyâs A Blueprint of His Dissent (1989). Thus Faas argues that âthe dramatic monologue did not establish itself as a proper school of psychological poetryâ until 1855, and his study, like those of Colley and Platizky, accordingly hurries towards Tennysonâs âMaudâ as quickly as possible, leaving the poetry of the 1830s and 1840s comparatively neglected (Faas 1988, 16). The relationship between poetry and medical psychology in the post-Romantic period has thus tended to fall into the gap between studies on Romantic poetic madness and those on Victorian poetic psychology, and in consequence it has yet to be seriously addressed within the existing scholarship on either subject.
This gap, in turn, means that the question of Tennysonâs and Browningâs interactions with medical psychology had never been systematically considered in relation to their struggle with the legacies of British Romanticism. This latter topic has been repeatedly addressed in the existing scholarship, in works such as Riversâ Robert Browningâs Theory of the Poet (1976), Nemoianuâs The Taming of Romanticism (1984), Tuckerâs Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (1988), Harrisonâs Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems (1990), Croninâs Romantic Victorians (2002), Bakerâs Browning and Wordsworth (2004), and Martensâ Browning, Victorian Poetics, and the Romantic Legacy (2011), but none of these works relate the vexed relationship between late Romantic and early Victorian poetry to the changing attitudes towards poetic talent expressed within the medical psychology of the period. However, it is my contention that the shifting interpretation of genius ushered in by the medical psychology of the 1830s and 1840s played an important role in making Nemoianuâs âtaming of Romanticismâ seem both possible and desirable: and if a âschool of psychological poetryâ arose in the 1850s, it was only because the way had been cleared for it by the progressive medicalisation of poetic psychology over the previous generation.
Unlike Faas, Tate, and Rylance, I have thus chosen to focus not on how the mid-nineteenth century âsciences of the mindâ influenced the mature, post-1850 poetry of Browning, Tennyson, and their contemporaries, but on the ways in which their earlier poetry interacted with the medical psychology of the 1825â1850 period. Over the course of these decades, Tennyson and Browning ultimately made their peace with the new psychiatryâbut many of their contemporaries did not, and post-Romantic poets such as Barrett Browning, Horne, Townshend, and the âspasmodicsâ continued to insist that inspired poetic genius possessed an authority superior to that of any doctor. (Tellingly, many of these writers gravitated towards mesmerism as an alternative to the mainstream medicine of their day.) It is this struggle over the boundaries between inspiration and madness that this book aims to map out.
Methodologically, I have used Tennyson and Browning as case studies of the ways in which the practice of poetry during the period reflected these changing attitudes towards poetic talent. In some ways, the two men were very similar: both were poets of great ability and ambition, both had deep interests in psychology, and both began their careers as admirers of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. In other respects, they were opposites: they moved in very different (and politically opposed) social circles, and their own personal experiences of mental infirmity were poles apart, with Browning seemingly never feeling himself anything less than robustly sane while Tennyson suffered continual anxieties over his own proximity to madness. Their similarities make them comparable, while their differences make the comparisons between them meaningful: for if two poets as socially and psychologically divergent as Browning and Tennyson followed similar creative trajectories over the course of the period, as I shall argue that they did, then this suggests that something more than personal preference was at work. By comparing and contrasting the ways in which their works reflected the evolving debate over inspiration and insanity, I aim to explore how these issues affected individuals for whom the nature of poetic genius was a matter of direct personal significance, rather than an abstract medical or philosophical question. Their importance is heightened by the scale of their influence upon subsequent British poetryâfor where Browning and Tennyson went, the next generation of British poets more or less followed. As a result, their respons...