Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Joseph Crawford

   Pages 1-8

3. ‘He was not one of ye’: Poetry and Mental Peculiarity, 1825–1836

   • Joseph Crawford

   Pages 9-57

4. ‘Ah! let me not be fool’d’: Delusion and Inspiration in the Poems of Browning and Tennyson, 1832–1840

   • Joseph Crawford

   Pages 59-105

5. Sir William’s Last Stand: Poetry and Insanity in England, 1837–1842

   • Joseph Crawford

   Pages 107-148

6. Seeing Things: Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Romantic Poetry, 1836–1855

   • Joseph Crawford

   Pages 149-196

7. ‘The Madness’: Inspiration and Insanity in Spasmodic Poetry, 1851–1855

   • Joseph Crawford

   Pages 197-236

8. Epilogue: ‘It is strange.’

   • Joseph Crawford

   Pages 237-242

9. Back Matter

   Pages 243-248

   PDF

This book explores the ways in which poetic inspiration came to be associated with madness in early nineteenth-century Britain. By examining the works of poets such as Barrett, Browning, Clare, Tennyson, Townshend, and the Spasmodics in relation to the burgeoning asylum system and shifting medical discourses of the period, it investigates the ways in which Britain’s post-Romantic poets understood their own poetic vocations within a cultural context that insistently linked poetic talent with illness and insanity. Joseph Crawford examines the popularity of mesmerism among the writers of the era, as an alternative system of medicine that provided a more sympathetic account of the nature of poetic genius, and investigates the persistent tension, found throughout the literary and medical writings of the period, between the Romantic ideal of the poet as a transcendent visionary genius and the ‘medico-psychological’ conception of poets as mere case studies in abnormal neurological development.

• madness studies
• Romantic poetry
• Victorian poetry
• cognitive literary studies
• literature and science
• history of psychology
• poetry and the self

“This is a beautifully-written, timely study; it turns to a theme upon which much remains to be said and, while we have had readings of the moral management system and mesmerism, we are offered a new setting for them here in association with the power of poetic exploration and literary genius.” (Andrew Mangham, University of Reading, UK)

• University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

  Joseph Crawford

Joseph Crawford is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. His previous books include Raising Milton’s Ghost (2011), Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013), and The Twilight of the Gothic (2014).

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