*Originally Published in The Pierian #1* Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Bob Kaufman: for these twentieth-century poets, the border between creativity and madness was porous. Many other twentieth-century lights, though less notorious, belong in this family of troubled minds. Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton, David Schubert, Hayden Carruth, Allen Ginsberg and any number of others did not approach any reasonable standard of mental health. Yet none of these accomplished, complex, and fascinating personalities can be reduced to a label. No poet wants their work and legacy to be explained away by illness. But when we hear of a poet living a life that fits within social norms, we are prone to suspicion. Shouldn’t it take exclusion or suffering—more than mere eccentricity—to become a real poet? Many of our finest living poets are open about their struggles. Natasha Trethewey speaks of trauma; Louise Glück, anorexia; Ocean Vuong, substance abuse. Not that it surprises us. We prefer our heroes well-seasoned, and celebrity culture has conditioned us to take our schadenfreude where we can get it. It is no surprise that fame gets quite dark quite fast. The life of Byron demonstrates that. The surprise is that it seems no different at all levels of success. Most of the dedicated, aspiring poets I’ve had the pleasure of working with are struggling with something, often something pretty heavy. Does the discipline attract practitioners who want to assuage the loneliness of an outsider mentality, or does the practice of poetry itself lead its aficionados to psychological challenges? Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps discovered that his size-14 feet, however ungainly on land, conveyed a distinct advantage when submerged. Likewise, a prospective poet may consider their own social dysfunction a feature, not a bug. The story of madness and inspiration is a story as old as philosophy—Plato captures the gist of it in his dialogue Ion, in which the eponymous rhapsode is interrogated by Socrates about the nature of his verse-mania. Poetry can benefit from mental abnormality while also soothing it. While these two psychological positions on poetry seem to be in logical contradiction, the aspiring poet feels a growing certainty that in poetry, as in aquatics, the strictures of dry land need not apply. What loftier purpose could an art form serve than to release psychic pain? The shop-talk of poets seems to bear out their psychological specialty. They speak of catharsis, of persona, of symbolism, association, and myth. Poets, more than any other artists, seem to embrace the terminology of psychology as their own. Under this rubric, the development of 20th-century literature follows a clear progression, like the current of a river. The dam break of Freudian thought influences Modernism, generating a movement intent on breaking taboos on topic and style while shedding traditional poetic forms. Exponents like Eliot, Pound, H.D., Williams, and Moore reposition poetry away from its moribund Christian superstition, diving into the deep end of the psycho-sexual. This watershed release of the unconscious carries us naturally through the Beats—Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti—to the confessional poetry of Bishop, Lowell, and Roethke, and on to the end of the twentieth century with Kunitz and Graham. The centrality of psychology remains intact today. As the aperture of poetry opens to a greater diversity of voices and backgrounds, the bedrock marriage of poetry and psychology seems secure. #@callout Yet a view of poetic excellence as a continuum that dawned with Freud and has progressed steadily to a deeper understanding of the human psyche is myopic. Yet a view of poetic excellence as a continuum that dawned with Freud and has progressed steadily to a deeper understanding of the human psyche is myopic. If you’ve read a book printed before Goethe, you know that psychological sophistication was not invented by Modernism; subjectivity and depth are core features of literature of all times and cultures. The idea that the criticism of poetry, or its practice, is reducible to a subdomain of psychology was already thoroughly refuted by Lionel Trilling more than seventy years ago in essays collected in his book The Liberal Imagination. Trilling is respectful of Freud, whose death and impact were still being processed by Trilling’s New York intellectual circle, but his careful evaluation of Freud’s writing demonstrates why we should “accept neither Freud’s conception of the place of art in life nor his application of the analytic method.” To paraphrase Trilling, neurosis cannot explain why a writer is great any more than it can explain why a businessperson is successful. It can be part of an explanation, but not the only part. Fortunately, many aspiring poets who at first approach the field with a narrow psychological orientation continue to study and read more broadly and deeply. This path leads to intellectual nourishment, even if the taste for psychoanalysis never totally subsides. For example, re-reading Freud with a firmer classical basis makes his work more lively and sympathetic, and his universe of Greek borrowings that have entered our parlance feel vital again—narcissism, psyche, ego, oedipal, hysterics, catharsis, eros, and so on. As Freud wrote in a letter to his colleague Jung, “We must be careful when besieging Troy.” Freud’s great contribution to our culture is not that authors’ books, like patients’ minds, can be analyzed using his clinical methodology. It is the exact opposite. His era had just begun to formalize literary studies as a rigorous method of textual analysis. Freud realized the mind could be treated in exactly the same way—as a text to be studied more or less dispassionately. %%SECTIONBREAK%% As I continue to discuss the role of psychology in contemporary poetry, it is imperative that I differentiate carefully between production and reception—what a poet consumes from their milieu in order to create a poem, versus what intellectual approach readers could benefit from in order to appreciate it. #@callout Poetry is often produced under a fog of mystification and misdirection. Poetry is often produced under a fog of mystification and misdirection. That opium is connected to Coleridge’s poetic production does not mean his readers must study pharmacology. Yeats took his ouija board very seriously and dabbled in fencing, just as Denise Levertov was a dedicated student of yoga. This does not make these pursuits prerequisite to understanding their work. Hobbies and vices that stimulate a poet’s imagination (or that they claim stimulate them) change with the times, for fashion is a fundamental component of aesthetics. Psychology informs many twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets, but it is not the most essential context for the understanding of their art. Production and reception are common to the larger family of fine and performing arts. The most laser-focused aspiring dancer, too busy in the studio for the idleness of the classroom, still invariably develops a practical knowledge of the reception of their art form. Upon joining a company, they will absorb the repertoire, travel, perform, and most importantly, socialize. They will internalize a sense of precedent and perspective, guided as much by nuggets of lore regarding Nijinski or Balanchine as by anything more formal. In this manner, they become competent at the reception of their art form, not just the practice of it. The poet, whose trade both necessitates and nurtures a greater degree of isolation, cannot expect any comparable on-the-job training in poetic reception, and a few hours of workshop per week pales in comparison to the dancer’s exhausting regimen. The dancer’s daily grind is based, down to its finest minutiae, on imitating the positions of those with more experience. Just as gravity refines, through resistance, the dancer’s physique, the pressure of precedent opposes, and thus strengthens, the dancer’s artistic sensibility. As skill and confidence grow in the mirror of precedent, the dancer’s pride of pedagogical lineage is as natural as it is unavoidable. Each dancer tailors, adjusts, and reimagines, but mimicry forms the cornerstone of learning. Novice poets are subject to no such strictures from their mentors, at least not today. Previous generations cut their teeth on Roman, Edwardian, and Romantic verse forms from a young age. Today’s aspiring writers ejaculate, “but I don’t want to write like anybody else!” Fortunately, mimicry is not the only school of imitation, and a softer diffusion of forms, temperaments, topics, and fashions can be absorbed by simply reading widely. Assuming the poet has a standing invitation from their librarian, and a genuine curiosity in their chosen discipline, a little diligence is all of what is required to awaken what Trilling called “a sense of the past”. Poems always evoke the themes, sounds, and imagery of poems before them, both directly and indirectly; it’s not possible to discern accident from intention infallibly. The skilled poet is free to play this ambiguity to advantage. Harold Bloom, in “The Art of Reading Poetry,” gives the example of the word “ruins.” He writes that this word, whenever it appears in a poem, has a “figurative power…[that] seems endless,” because every poet confronts the discarded materials of language that once constituted the castle of their forebears. The art of poetry has a relationship to its tradition that is intertwined with its practice in ways that ultimately defy easy comparison to any other art. Poets make stuff out of words, and these words are freighted by previous coinage. While superficially similar to the psychological notion of association, literary allusion is a technique that must be studied and developed, irrespective of the poet’s own personality and tendencies. #@callout in order to produce a successful poem, the poet must be aware of reception and undaunted by the futility of trying one’s hand against prior greats. Returning to our distinction above between production and reception, we can now observe that in order to produce a successful poem, the poet must be aware of reception and undaunted by the futility of trying one’s hand against prior greats. The reader must be convinced, or the very least, made to blink first. Like Prospero’s island, the satisfactions of a poem are fabrications, “such stuff as dreams are made on.” Elements of biography and psychology may be recruited to work their magic, but first and foremost it’s the sound, shape, and rhythm that hold the spell. A sense of the past is one of many senses that may delight readers. Others include a sense of place, of presence, of contemporaneity, of dream, of clarity, and of conviction itself. These emergent properties of a poem are all fabrications. As readers, we cannot discern with any certainty whether these effects required decades of preparation or just good lighting. We can’t know what’s hard-won or cheaply staged, and attempts at speculation rarely end well, as this famous anecdote illustrates: @excerpt{ Frank O'Hara introduced his occasional poem "Lana Turner has collapsed!" at a poetry reading in 1962, explaining to the audience that he had written the poem on the Staten Island ferry en route to the reading. Robert Lowell was also in attendance that day, and when it came time for him to read, Lowell apologized for not having written his poem on the spot too. } Today we live in a period where attitudes toward the past, and particularly the value of studying and preserving it, are shifting rapidly. We are less curious about it; we condescend to thinkers and artists of earlier eras and the scent of their prejudices repulses us, like the suitor of Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” bolting at the sight of his beloved’s chamber-pot. %%SECTIONBREAK%% Psychology cannot make a science of poetry, nor does it offer a shortcut to poetic excellence. Yet however much we may wish to lift our field off the analyst’s couch, we should not be too hasty. I have been part of a moderating team for a poetry forum on Reddit for several years, and a constant throughout has been a high volume of suicide poems. Many of the poems read like crude notes taped to the proverbial closet door, while others attempt excited imagery around suicidal ideation. I have no idea whether posting these poems helps or hurts their authors’ odds of survival. Yet despite our efforts as moderators to respond with suicide prevention information and immediate, timely resources for those in crisis, the poems nevertheless attract vast virtual crowds of one-click samaritans. The comment sections are piled deep with formulaic bromides like “it gets better bro” that wholly ignore the text of the poem and opt instead to respond to its author. These texts, bypassing the usual defenses of audiences, activate the desire of the reader to rid themselves of guilt. By fishing for pity, suicide notes multiply like weeds through concrete, filling the cracks and forming a kind of permanent background radiation. Poems that touch on themes of suicide, self-harm and mental illness were also common during my time advising and coaching poets. I always begin any discussion of such work with the caveat that sharing poems with me is no substitute for getting treatment from a professional of an entirely different stripe. Poetry and psychology must recognize that they are distinct disciplines with distinct values and deeply different aims and areas of expertise. Data speak to the depth of the problem. A 2013 study examined the records of nearly 1.2 million Swedish subjects and concluded that “being an author was specifically associated with increased likelihood” of many serious mental disorders, as well as “substance abuse” and “suicide” (Kyaga et al.). Let us return to what Plato said of Ion’s madness. Ion was out of his mind because it was required during his work as a rhapsode performing and interpreting poetry for a live audience. At other times, he was as calm and collected as Socrates himself; his condition was not persistent. When Trilling examines Freud’s ideas of neurosis in literature, he rejects the idea that amplitude of neurosis should correspond with amplitude of artistic significance. In art, neuroses, large and small, “must be understood as exemplifying cultural forces of great moment,” lest they be “meaningless or merely personal.” Trilling, diverging from Plato, embraces the psychological truth that literary culture is created by the transmutation of inner disturbance into lasting beauty, but he rejects psychology’s tendency to conflate the two. Beauty and truth are lofty goals, and most of us, even our most celebrated and talented, usually fall short of Keats’ standard. Objectively, there is no rational reason for any of us to keep on trucking in the face of eternal futility—as Bob Dylan quipped, “The world don't need any more poems, it's got Shakespeare.” Despite our spells of wishful thinking, we working poets mostly understand this. We know poetry is not going to solve life’s serious problems. We also know, from lived experience, that it comes at a cost of time, treasure, and even mental wellness. Sure, we wouldn’t mind a little praise, but that’s not why keep at it. We do it as a service to the art form that we love. Every poem is a marriage of waking and dreaming, of clarity and obscurity. Every poet ties themself to the mast, daring madness. The temptation, as ever, is not to tighten the knots, but cut the rope. __Works Cited__ Bloom, Harold. "The Art of Reading Poetry." The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost. Harper Perennial, 2004, pp. 1-29.__ Freud, Sigmund, and C. G. Jung. The Freud/Jung letters : The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung. Edited by William McGuire, translated by Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull, Princeton University Press, 1974. Hartman, Anne. "Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg." Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 28, no. 4, 2005, pp. 40-56. Project MUSE, doi.org/10.2979/jml.2005.28.4.40. Kyaga, Simon et al. “Mental Illness, Suicide and Creativity: 40-year Prospective Total Population Study.” Journal of Psychiatric Research, vol. 47, no. 1, 2013, pp. 83-90. doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2012.09.010. Trilling, Lionel. "Art and Neurosis." The Liberal Imagination. New York Review Books, 2008, pp. 160-80. Trilling, Lionel. "Freud and Literature." The Liberal Imagination. New York Review Books, 2008, pp. 34-57. Zollo, Paul. "Bob Dylan: The Song Talk Interview." Bread Crumb Sins, www.interferenza.net/bcs/interw/1991zollo.htm. Transcription of 1991 interview from Genuine Bootleg Series #3 booklet.