This article contains references to suicide. The publication last year of Steven M. Weine’s Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness has reinvigorated enduring questions about the relationship between mental health and creativity.
As the title suggests, these questions are at once literary and sociopolitical. Does mental illness beget great poetry? Many poets – celebrated and obscure, from antiquity to the present – have, to varying degrees, navigated issues of mental health. But does this lead to literary excellence? How do we address such questions, which are themselves not exactly unproblematic? Leaving aside any evaluation of “greatness” and “excellence” for gatekeepers of canon to squabble over, we need to be wary of the cult of the poète maudit – the accursed, damned or doomed poet – and particularly the propensity to romanticise, even fetishise, such poets and their work.
Needless to say, there exist long traditions across many cultures of treating “madness” as a conduit of vision, illumination, prophecy. Those deemed “mad” have often been treated as seers, vehicles of a truth which goes against the current of quotidian life, disruptors of the systems of “civilised” society. Such traditions of lionising outsiders as poet-seers are complicated in post-industrial society.
Weine frames “madness” as culturally ascribed, but “mental illness” as clinical. The latter is pathologised according to what Michel .