There is no invention in him (the poet) until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles. [Footnote: Ion, §534.]
And again,
There is a … kind of madness which is a possession of the Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other numbers…. But he who, not being inspired, and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman. [Footnote: Phaedrus, § 245.]
Even Aristotle, that sanest of philosophers, so far agrees with Plato as to say,
Poetry implies either a happy gift of nature, or a strain of madness. In the one case, a man can take the mold of any character; in the other he is lifted out of his proper self. [Footnote: Poetics, XVII.]
One must admit that poets nowadays are not always so frank as earlier ones in describing their state of mind. Now that the lunatic is no longer placed in the temple, but in the hospital, the popular imputation of insanity to the poet is not always favorably received. Occasionally he regards it as only another unjust charge brought against him by a hostile world. Thus a brother poet has said that George Meredith's lot was
Like Lear's—for he had felt the sting
Of all too greatly giving
The kingdom of his mind to those
Who for it deemed him mad.
[Footnote: Cale Young Rice, Meredith.]
In so far as the world's pronouncement is based upon the oracles to which the poet gives utterance, he always repudiates the charge of madness. Such various poets as Jean Ingelow, [Footnote: See Gladys and Her Island.] James Thomson, B. V., [Footnote: See Tasso to Leonora.] Helen Hunt Jackson, [Footnote: See The Singer's Hills.] Alice Gary, [Footnote: See Genius.] and George Edward Woodberry, [Footnote: See He Ate the Laurel and is Mad.] concur in the judgment that the poet is called insane by the rabble simply because they are blind to the ideal world in which he lives. Like the cave-dwellers of Plato's myth, men resent it when the seer, be he prophet or philosopher, tells them that there are things more real than the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world, are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is not at all sure that the world is wrong in its doubt of ideal truth. The tone of his poem, Tasso and Leonora, is very gloomy. The Italian poet is shown in prison, reflecting upon his faith in the ideal realms where eternal beauty dwells. He muses,
Yes—as Love is truer far
Than all other things; so are
Life and Death, the World and Time
Mere false shows in some great Mime
By dreadful mystery sublime.
But at the end Tasso's faith is troubled, and he ponders,