Poets And Their Mental Disorders
By Dennis L. Siluk
Mar. 6, 2005
Well, it shouldn’t be any secret, most poets have some kind of mental disorder. If that doesn’t sound familiar, just do a case study on any of them. Just for information sake, I’ll mention a few of the poets I like, and what I think was their mental make up, maybe I’ll even add myself into the picture, see how brave I am. So on one hand I may give my personal diagnosis on these poets, on the other I’ll leave out the prognosis, for most poets are guarded and it is hard to do. So empirical data is what I shall go by, that is others empirical data, and their writings.
Poets like Hemingway, and Dylan Thomas were all alcoholics, so we can attach an Anxiety disorder along with that obsessive-compulsive craving. Most poets are bipolar; we that is to say, have a few ounces of mania and depression to both sides of their personality, inwardly and outwardly. The bad thing with alcohol and depression, the more alcohol you drink the more depressed you get, one feeds the melancholy, to a deeper disorder.
For the suicidal caseload (of which I am not one), we got Hemingway again, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Thakl [The German poet, died at 27]; and a few more I’ll add in later. Some with organic personality disorders, like myself, and others with anxiety disorders, NOS/Neuroses]. George Sterling, one of the great poets, also committed suicide at a young age; in having I believe a bipolar disorder.
Schizophrenia is also another disorder not contributed to physical conditions to my knowledge, as would be organic type disorder. But a many poets fall into this category as we’ll for many with the bipolar disorder; Schizophrenia is simply boarder line with them.
In my early studies, and that was many years ago, I had to study Abnormal Behavior Patterns, for one of the many psychology classes I had to take, before I got my license to counsel, and it is impressive, if not annoying to see how many personality disorders are created by the organic type diagnosis. I had to deal with a verity of schizophrenia type cases also, finding most were above average at one time in intelligence, but catatonic stages whipped them dry, or paranoid type episodes sucked them into a vortex they could not get out of; often times leaving them with affective features.
But let me go on with the poets in general. Alcoholism, excessive drinking, addiction, drugs, opium barbiturates, they all play a role as psycho-stimulants, and have their down fall for the poet; no poet lives long on drugs or alcohol that is for sure. Although I do believe James Wright had some kind of mental disorder, a Minnesota poet, and did drink a lot in his day, died in l980, at the age I think of 53, it was cancer, like Clark A. Smith, who was a great poet, and H.P. Lovecraft, all dying to my knowledge of cancer; all three loners, reclusive to a high degree; possibly all with bipolar disorders; others with limited ability to interact, other than superficially with workers, supervisors, and the public in general; and when they did, it was normally brief at beast.
Robert E. Howard, after his mother died, committed suicide, he was a great weird writer, but his poetry was superb. As was Victor Hugo’s; Hemmingway’s poetry, of which I have little of, was arrogant, satirical, so his suicidal world was plagued from the start I do believe, by not only paranoia, for he did believe the FBI, as well as Castro himself was after him; thus he would fall into some alcoholic psychosis area/infection. Believe it or not, James Joyce was a great poet, the rest of his crap you can throw in the garbage. I do believe I could place him in an odd category called transient situational disturbances. Even Theodore Roethke, was a known manic/depressant, but good poet. Neruda, a poet from Chile, had two strange sides to him likewise. Ginsberg, was homosexual, and had his share of bazaar lifestyles, with Williams Burroughs, who could play the poet, but was not a real one in my eyes. So you see here, we got a pot full of crickets.
So it comes down to: do we have any sane poets out there? I doubt it; and if they are, they are most likely not giving you the Picasso in poetry they’d like to give, because they can’t. I could mention many more poets, but these are the ones that come to mind, lest we, and we should not, forget Emile Dickinson, and V. Woolf, both strange in their own backyards.
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By Dennis L. Siluk
Mar. 6, 2005
Well, it shouldn’t be any secret, most poets have some kind of mental disorder. If that doesn’t sound familiar, just do a case study on any of them. Just for information sake, I’ll mention a few of the poets I like, and what I think was their mental make up, maybe I’ll even add myself into the picture, see how brave I am. So on one hand I may give my personal diagnosis on these poets, on the other I’ll leave out the prognosis, for most poets are guarded and it is hard to do. So empirical data is what I shall go by, that is others empirical data, and their writings.
Poets like Hemingway, and Dylan Thomas were all alcoholics, so we can attach an Anxiety disorder along with that obsessive-compulsive craving. Most poets are bipolar; we that is to say, have a few ounces of mania and depression to both sides of their personality, inwardly and outwardly. The bad thing with alcohol and depression, the more alcohol you drink the more depressed you get, one feeds the melancholy, to a deeper disorder.
For the suicidal caseload (of which I am not one), we got Hemingway again, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Thakl [The German poet, died at 27]; and a few more I’ll add in later. Some with organic personality disorders, like myself, and others with anxiety disorders, NOS/Neuroses]. George Sterling, one of the great poets, also committed suicide at a young age; in having I believe a bipolar disorder.
Schizophrenia is also another disorder not contributed to physical conditions to my knowledge, as would be organic type disorder. But a many poets fall into this category as we’ll for many with the bipolar disorder; Schizophrenia is simply boarder line with them.
In my early studies, and that was many years ago, I had to study Abnormal Behavior Patterns, for one of the many psychology classes I had to take, before I got my license to counsel, and it is impressive, if not annoying to see how many personality disorders are created by the organic type diagnosis. I had to deal with a verity of schizophrenia type cases also, finding most were above average at one time in intelligence, but catatonic stages whipped them dry, or paranoid type episodes sucked them into a vortex they could not get out of; often times leaving them with affective features.
But let me go on with the poets in general. Alcoholism, excessive drinking, addiction, drugs, opium barbiturates, they all play a role as psycho-stimulants, and have their down fall for the poet; no poet lives long on drugs or alcohol that is for sure. Although I do believe James Wright had some kind of mental disorder, a Minnesota poet, and did drink a lot in his day, died in l980, at the age I think of 53, it was cancer, like Clark A. Smith, who was a great poet, and H.P. Lovecraft, all dying to my knowledge of cancer; all three loners, reclusive to a high degree; possibly all with bipolar disorders; others with limited ability to interact, other than superficially with workers, supervisors, and the public in general; and when they did, it was normally brief at beast.
Robert E. Howard, after his mother died, committed suicide, he was a great weird writer, but his poetry was superb. As was Victor Hugo’s; Hemmingway’s poetry, of which I have little of, was arrogant, satirical, so his suicidal world was plagued from the start I do believe, by not only paranoia, for he did believe the FBI, as well as Castro himself was after him; thus he would fall into some alcoholic psychosis area/infection. Believe it or not, James Joyce was a great poet, the rest of his crap you can throw in the garbage. I do believe I could place him in an odd category called transient situational disturbances. Even Theodore Roethke, was a known manic/depressant, but good poet. Neruda, a poet from Chile, had two strange sides to him likewise. Ginsberg, was homosexual, and had his share of bazaar lifestyles, with Williams Burroughs, who could play the poet, but was not a real one in my eyes. So you see here, we got a pot full of crickets.
So it comes down to: do we have any sane poets out there? I doubt it; and if they are, they are most likely not giving you the Picasso in poetry they’d like to give, because they can’t. I could mention many more poets, but these are the ones that come to mind, lest we, and we should not, forget Emile Dickinson, and V. Woolf, both strange in their own backyards.
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posted by Dennis and Rosa Siluk at 10:14 PM
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