A Mind Apart: Poems of Melancholy, Madness, and Addiction

"Much madness is divinest sense," wrote Emily Dickinson, "And much sense the starkest madness." The idea that poetry and madness are deeply intertwined, and that madness sometimes leads to the most divine poetry, has been with us since antiquity. In his critical and clinical introduction to this splendid anthology--the first of its kind--psychiatrist and poet Mark S. Bauer considers mental disorders from multiple perspectives and challenges us to broaden our outlook. He has selected more than 200 poems from across seven centuries that reflect a wide range mental states--from despondency and despair to melancholy, mania, and complete submersion into a world of heightened, original perception. Featuring such poets as George Herbert, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, Weldon Kees, Lucille Clifton, Jane Kenyon, and many others, A Mind Apart has much to offer those who suffer from mental illness, those who work to understand it, and all those who value the poetry that has come to us from the heights and depths of human experience.

Mark S. Bauer is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Harvard South Shore Psychiatry Residency Training Program. He has published well over 100 scientific articles and book chapters, and four other books. His poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals in the US, UK, and Australia, and he is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Imperial Days and The Gnarled Man Rises.

Preface

Introduction

Poems

Thomas Hoccleve (1368/9-c.1426)

from "Hoccleve Remembers His Madness"

from "Anxious Thought"

Charles d'Orleans (1394-1465)

I am Forsaken

Farewell this World

William Dunbar (1460-1520)

In Winter

Alexander Barclay (1475-1552)

from "Ship of Fools"

Anonymous (published 1500)

A Song of Ale

Anonymous (published 1500)

Petition to Have Her Leave to Die

Fulke Greville (1554-1628)

from "Despair"

Thomas Lodge (1557-1625)

Melancholy

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Sonnet 129

Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639)

Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton's Wife

A Hymn to God in a Night of My Late Sickness

John Davies (1569-1618)

Affliction

Robert Burton (1577-1640)

The Author's Abstract of Melancholy

John Fletcher (1579-1625) and/or Thomas Middleton (1580-1627)

Melancholy

Lady Mary Wroth (1586-1652)

Sonnet VI from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Sonnet XIX from The Countess of Montgomery's Urania

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

The Mad Maid's Song

George Herbert (1593-1633)

Affliction I

Affliction IV

The Collar

John Milton (1608-1674)

from "Samson Agonistes"

Methought I saw my late espoused Saint

Ann Bradstreet (1612-1672)

Upon Some Distemper of the Body

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1624-1674)

A Discourse on Melancholy

Thomas Traherne (1636-1674)

Solitude

James Carkesse (published 1679)

On the Doctors' Telling Him that till He Left off Making Verses He was Not Fit to Be Discharged

Anonymous (published 1658)

On Melancholy

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720)

The Spleen: A Pindaric Poem

Edward Ward (1667-1731)

The Extravagant Drunkard's Wish

Isaac Watts (1674-1748)

The Hurry of the Spirits, in a Fever and Nervous Disorders

Edward Young (1683-1765)

from "Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality: Night I"

William Harrison (1685-1713)

In Praise of Laudanum

Mary Barber (1685-1755)

On seeing an Officer's Widow distracted, who had been driven to Despair by a long and Fruitless Solicitation for the Arrears of her Pension

Anonymous (published 1692)

Loving Mad Tom

Matthew Green (1696-1737)

from "The Spleen. An Epistle to Mr. C---J---"

William Collins (1721-1759)

Ode to Fear

Thomas Mozeen (published 1768)

The Bedlamite

Christopher Smart (1722-1771)

Hymn to the Supreme Being

from "Jubliate Agno"

Thomas Warton (1728-1790)

from "The Pleasures of Melancholy"

William Cowper (1731-1800)

Lines Written During a Period Of Insanity

The Shrubbery, Written in a Time of Affliction

Anonymous (published 1733)

A Receipt to Cure Love's Fit

Robert Fergusson (1750-1774)

Ode to Disappointment

Anonymous (published 1751)

Strip Me Naked, or Royal Gin for Ever. A Picture

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770)

Sunday, A Fragment

John Codrington Bampfylde (1754-1796)

On a Frightful Dream

William Blake (1757-1828)

My Spectre around me night and day

To Mr. Butts, Gr. Marlborough St. London; from Letters, A Selection

Mary

Mad Song

William Bloomfield (1766-1823)

from "The Farmer's Boy"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

The Suicide's Argument

The Pains of Sleep

from "Dejection: An Ode"

Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)

from "Lament of Tasso"

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples

John Clare (1793-1864)

I Am

Sonnet: I Am

The Ruins of Despair

To Melancholy

Song

John Keats (1795-1821)

Ode on Melancholy

Anonymous ("Orestes") (published 1796)

A Sonnet to Opium: Celebrating its Virtues. Written at the side of Julia, when the Author was Inspired with a Dose of Laudanum, more than Sufficient for two Moderate Turks

Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839)

I welcome the back again, Spirit of Song

Popular Songs

American Mock-Bird (published 1801)

The Mad Lover

Crazy Paul

Temple of Harmony (published 1801)

Song

Choice Collection (published 1805)

Crazy Jane

The Death of Crazy Jane

Boston Musical Miscellany (published 1815)

Nancy and Gin

Songster's Companion (published 1815)

Mary LeMore

Songs for Ladies (published 1825)

The Frantic Maid

Muse, or The Flowers of Poetry(published 1827)

Soliloquy on Smoking

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Grief

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

from "In Memoriam: III, XIV, XIX"

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

from "Empedocles on Aetna"

Sydney Dobell (1824-1874)

from "Balder. Part the First. Scenes XIII and XIV"

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

#126

#410

#435

#670

#1062

Henry Kendall (1839-1882)

Outre Mer

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Just the Same

The Wound

In Tenebris II

Mad Judy

Robert Bridges (1844-1930)

Melancholia

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief

Carrion Comfort

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day

A. Mary F. Robinson (1857-1944)

Neurasthenia

Ernest Dowson (1867-1900)

To one in Bedlam

Spleen

Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Melancholy

Rain

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Repression of War Experience

Haunted

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)

Strange Hells

The Shame

To God

An Appeal for Death

For Mercy of Death

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Mental Cases

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

Sorrow

I Know 100 Ways to Die

Menses

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

Resume

Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

Evening in the Sanitarium

Hart Crane (1899-1932)

The Idiot

(John Orley) Allen Tate (1899-1979)

Ode to Fear

Anonymous (published 1930)

from "Thoughts Suggested on a Thanksgiving Day Passed at the State Lunatic Asylum, Worcester, Mass. by a Patient"

from Poetry of the Insane (Dr. Charles Mayos, editor; published 1930)

Awakening

The Snow

The Cure

Richard David Comstock (published 1930)

Always Like This

Stanley Kuntiz (1905-2006)

The Portrait

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

In a Dark Time

Her Longing

Lines Upon Leaving a Sanitarium

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

Visits to Saint Elizabeth's

J. V. (James Vincent) Cunningham (1911-1985)

from "Interview with Doctor Drink"

Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)

from "The Studies of Narcissus"

from Genesis, Book II

John Berryman (1914-1972)

Dreamsongs 172

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

In the Ward: The Sacred Wood

Weldon Kees (1914-1955)

from "The Fall of the Magicians"

The Clinic

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Out of the Sighs

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

Visitors

Waking in the Blue

Home after Three Months Away

Unwanted

Robert Edward Duncan (1919-1988)

Songs of An Other

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991)

To D-, Dead by Her Own Hand

Hayden Carruth (1921- )

from "The Asylum"

Lines Written in an Asylum

from "Ontological Episode of the Asylum"

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Neurotics

Anthony Hecht (1923-2004)

A Deep Breath at Dawn

Despair

Richard Hugo (1923-1982)

In Your War Dream

Cape Nothing

Letter to Logan from Milltown

James Schuyler (1923-1991)

The Payne Whitney Poems: What

The Payne Whitney Poems: Pastime

The Payne Whitney Poems: The Night

Donald Justice (1925-2004)

Counting the Mad

The Man Closing Up

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

from "Howl"

Robert Bly (1926- )

Depression

Wiley Clements (1928- )

Military Journalist

Ann Sexton (1928-1974)

from "The Double Image"

Addict

Ringing the Bells

Carl Wolfe Solomon (1928- )

Antitotalitarian Manifesto for Evergreen Review

Ned O'Gorman (1929- )

Peace, After Long Madness

Stuart Z. Perkoff (1930-1974)

from "The Venice Poems; I:4"

Junk Nursery Rhymes

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Elm

Street Song

from The Journal of Saint Dympna (Earl "Pete" Nurmi, editor; published 1979)

Lee Merrill

Medication

Mary Coleman

The ghost behemians of Meridel LeSueur

John Appling Sours

Institute at Christmas

Lucille Clifton (1936- )

shapeshifter poems

Jim Harrison (1937- )

Noon

Les Murray (1938- )

from Fredy Neptune, Book I

Sharon Olds (1942- )

Satan Says

Timothy Dekin (1943-2001)

Melancholy

Quincy Troupe (1943- )

River Town Packin House Blues

Thomas P. Beresford (1946- )

Edith in Ann Arbor

Robert L. Barth (1947- )

Epigraph from Deeply Dug In

Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)

Having it Out with Melancholy

Yusef Komunyakaa (1947- )

Losses

Joseph Salemi (1947- )

Sicilian Beachead

Aimee Grunberger (1951-1995)

The Administration of Veterans

Jimmy Santiago Baca (1952- )

This Dark Side

Mark Jarman (1952- )

Questions for Ecclesiastes

from "Transfiguration"

Franz Wright (1953- )

The Voice

Rorschach Test

Certain Tall Buildings

Thanks Prayer at the Cove

David Baker (1954- )

Hyper

Melancholy Man

Michael Lauchlan (1954- )

What You Hadn't

Joe Bolton (1961-1990)

Laguna Beach Breakdown

A Couple of Suicide Cases

Kelly Ann Malone (1963- )

Devices on Standby

Brian Turner (1967- )

Eulogy

Kevin Young (1970- )

Coke (The Real Thing)

from In the Realms of the Unreal. "Insane" Writings (John G.H. Oakes, editor) (published 1991) Nicol

By My Own Hand

Richard Beard

The Queen's Foreboding

Jeff Holt (1971- )

Imbalance

The Patient

Ricky Cantor (1985- )

E 9th Street

Coda: Anne Stevenson (1933- )

Letter to Sylvia Plath

Biographical Notes

Credits

Index of Poets

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines