On Poetry and Depression: Jay Griffiths's Point of View
Can poetry really heal? Jay Griffiths had had doubts about using poetry as a way to manage depression. But, as she writes for the Guardian, "I don’t normally write poetry, but in this illness I could write nothing except poetry. I never normally write at night, but I could write only in darkness." More:
In Dante’s time, books were sold in apothecary shops: literature as medicine. I learned this when I was very ill, during an acute episode of manic depression, and I was struck by the profound metaphor behind this commercial fact. The apothecary of literature can heal, and I would need it desperately.
I had experienced a psyche-fracture, which included hallucinations of wings, seeing my own and others’, these wings a metaphor for thought, the wings of the mind. Although I felt compelled to enact the urges of mania, I had a greater wish to hold very still and see what would happen if I let this madness take a metaphoric route. What happened? Poetry.
I don’t normally write poetry, but in this illness I could write nothing except poetry. I never normally write at night, but I could write only in darkness.
The ancient Greeks thought the gods inspired poets through madness, and in Ion, Plato has Socrates say: “For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses.” This furor poeticus was honoured in the Renaissance as the “fine madness” that “should possess a poet’s brain”, in the words of the Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton.
For me, poetry is medicine. The poet Les Murray writes: “I’d disapproved of using poetry as personal therapy, but the Black Dog taught me better. Get sick enough, and you’ll use any remedy you’ve got.” In the 19th century, people in asylums were encouraged to write poetry, while William Cowper (1731-1800) wrote that, in his depressions, “I find writing, especially poetry, my best remedy.” Orpheus was both healer and poet and his lyre could vanquish melancholy.
Continue at Guardian.