The poet's relationship to illness

By E.P. Groyp.

“ This race is inspired by fever and cancer”

Rimbaud - Song of the Highest Tower trans. Oliver Bernard

“I said to myself: let be,

And let no one see you:

Do without the promise

Of higher joys.

Let nothing delay you,

Majestic retirement.

[...]

I have endured so long

That I have forgotten everything;

Fear and suffering

Have flown to the skies.

And morbid thirst

Darkens my veins.

[...]

Enslaved by everything,

By being too sensitive

I have wasted my life.

Ah! Let the time come

When hearts are enamoured!”

The poet’s relationship to illness

The author has never endeavored to make a great work, nor has any great work. This is the first attempt at writing a piece of criticism, “criticism” being a foul word that will pathologize the act. Under the guise of advice from another author, that specifically being Pound: it would be advised to ignore this as a piece of criticism completely.

Those surveys which proclaim themselves criticism usually aim below the beauty of their own cited material. Silence is best taken between those pauses of explanation. That sort of silence which is only ever broken by recitation, and the ignoring of critics and reading of poetry.

If this were to be a true piece of criticism, an attempt would be made to ignore ALL biographical content of the poets. Those poets being Byron, Keats, Rimbaud, and De Quincey. 

For most people, life is unbearably short, for the poet it is unbearably long. This is wherein the problem lies. As the sickness of poet’s almost never makes it into their poetry, their deaths allow only for the work’s further digestion. 

On death

                                 I.

Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,

And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?

The transient pleasures as a vision seem,

And yet we think the greatest pain’s to die.

                                II.

How strange it is that man on earth should roam,

And lead a life of woe, but not forsake

His rugged path; nor dare he view alone

His future doom which is but to awake.

As a survey there is an element of trudging through mud when fragments are brought into a continuity. They stretch the limits of the biographical, and lead to interpretations that are merely biographical.

For Keats every moment of life is another eternity. Our poet forces a tactile regurgitation for each and every foot in the metered line. The sublime in the line is made to seem mundane, however as in the sublime of Longinus, it is not petty in that it is not grouped with mundane objects nor is it grouped with mundane sentiments or ideas.

Heaven is not brought down to earth, made to crash, or flood in this line of Keats, though it may certainly be a goal. It is a Frazer-esque rain dance in the appreciation of that final heaven, it’s spring lightning and showers.

Harmony is brought here between doom and bliss, but what purpose lies here?

Why further a concept of a beautiful life when this death is so close in the next stanza?

For within the poem there is a generated concept, that goes beyond the mere dream, death and life. Peace is brought forth between those empty questions, and hope may be put in those things outside mere generative capacity. To be “Awake”, to pathologize one’s own behavior, to explain away one’s own illness, is the fool’s game.

To write poetry is to deliberately mark against this type of thinking, Longinus in “On the Sublime” speaks on the true purpose of poetry in this case. The refinement of the language is not a mere undertaking for those trying to refine their own language. It is not a refinement of the mode of consciousness, it is a refinement of the very means for consciousness itself. 

For an exercise in this same solidification of the conscious mind, somebody might draw from the Anatomy of Melancholy of Burton that Keats so engaged himself towards.

Le Dormeur de Val

C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière

Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons

D'argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,

Luit : c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.

Un soldat jeune, lèvre bouche ouverte, tête nue,

Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,

Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe sous la nue,

Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme

Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme :

Nature, berce-le chaudement : il a froid.

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine;

Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,

Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.

The entire poem is a gesture towards a Keatsian immortality, and may even reference Keats directly as the green bed of the dead soldier may become the green tombs and altars of Keats.

Those eternal burial grounds. All men become the dead soldier in the poem. We are all restlessly sick, though we wish to die with smiles on our faces.

What Rimbaud does differently than Keats is reference youth.

The youngness of the dead soldier. He is cold, just a boy sleeping on his pillow of green. Rimbaud was tortured by youth, maybe so like that young soldier.

Poetry seems to be as much of a malaise as the seasickness Rimbaud suffered from the rest of his life. One would imagine him happy in death as much as the French soldier.

Those memories of life stay forever, the Gods of memory being the Gods of poetry, also remained an inspiration to De Quincey.

De Quincey explains the dilemma of the Poet clearly:

“the eye of the calmest observer is troubled; the brain is haunted as if by some jealousy of ghostly beings moving amongst us; and it becomes too evident that, unless this colossal pace of advance can be retarded (a thing not to be expected), or, which is happily more probable, can be met by counter-forces of corresponding magnitude—forces in the direction of religion or profound philosophy that shall radiate centrifugally against this storm of life so perilously centripetal towards the vortex of the merely human—left to itself, the natural tendency of so chaotic a tumult must be to evil; for some minds to lunacy, for others a reagency of fleshly torpor”

Those contradicting forces of life ascend poetry in it’s non-duality over the realm of philosophy. It’s ability to push the principle of love as an antinomy of harmonies, and contradiction within non-contradiction. It is not a mere daoism or innate desire to forcibly struggle in the attention of opposite parts. Rather it is the natural ordering of those contradictory elements which DO harmonize, as the bass A note allows for consonance with the treble A note.

The poem becomes the medium of expression for humanity that has the most abundant self generative capacity. Which makes it the center of that thing’s most common elements in love.

But, if this faculty suffers from the decay of solitude, which is becoming a visionary idea in England, on the other hand it is certain that some merely physical agencies can and do assist the faculty of dreaming almost preternaturally. Amongst these is intense exercise⁠—to some extent at least, for some persons; but beyond all others is opium: which indeed seems to possess a specific power in that direction; not merely for exalting the colours of dream-scenery, but for deepening its shadows, and, above all, for strengthening the sense of its fearful realities.

Those dreams which expand out of the fevers and cling a man to opium. Those youthful fevers and headaches lead a man to the darkness of self comfort, the sleep of many becomes the sleep of one. It is no longer a quantifiable number of nights or winters, it becomes every winter, and every night in eternality. 

The answer to that would be, “Because some early events in my life had left a weakness in one organ which required (or seemed to require) that stimulant.”

As to why the author took up opium, and in the same breath poetry. 

that enormity of exercise which (as I have since learned) is the one sole resource for making it endurable. I overlooked, in those days, the one sine qua non for making the triumph permanent. Twice I sank, twice I rose again. A third time I sank; partly from the cause mentioned (the oversight as to exercise), partly from other causes, on which it avails not now to trouble the reader. I could moralise, if I chose; and perhaps he will moralise, whether I choose it or not. But, in the meantime, neither of us is acquainted properly with the circumstances of the case: I, from natural bias of judgement, not altogether acquainted; and he (with his permission) not at all.

De Quincey speaks of a dilemma of the poet when he first enters the rhythm. He becomes caught up in the dreams of the first reverie, only through exercises in form is he able to break out of this construct. Like the physiology of a man who breaks out of an opium dream and onto the hills of England, his headaches return back to that first reverie of poetry, and the reading of it. The brain of the opiate addict is unable to realize that this first time staying bedridden reading poetry and not producing it is actually the second time, and when he rushes back onto hiking to get the sweats out it isn’t long before he makes his third jump into poetry or the sap of the poppy plant. 

Only through exercising the meter is it found, through prose or poetry this is accomplished with a vital brain and not a sick one. One that writes as it reads. One that stretches its arms as with its brain.

To feel the adrenal gland produce as much as the sublime can muster, while putting it onto its rightful page for posterity.

Byron’s Death poem: 

'Tis time this heart should be unmoved, 

       Since others it hath ceased to move: 

Yet though I cannot be beloved, 

                                    Still let me love! 

   My days are in the yellow leaf; 

       The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; 

The worm—the canker, and the grief 

                                    Are mine alone! 

   The fire that on my bosom preys 

       Is lone as some Volcanic Isle; 

No torch is kindled at its blaze 

                                    A funeral pile. 

   The hope, the fear, the jealous care, 

       The exalted portion of the pain 

And power of Love I cannot share, 

                                    But wear the chain. 

   But 'tis not thus—and 'tis not here 

       Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now, 

Where Glory decks the hero's bier, 

                                    Or binds his brow. 

   The Sword, the Banner, and the Field, 

       Glory and Greece around us see! 

The Spartan borne upon his shield 

                                    Was not more free. 

   Awake (not Greece—she is awake!) 

       Awake, my Spirit! Think through whom 

Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake 

                                    And then strike home! 

   Tread those reviving passions down 

       Unworthy Manhood—unto thee 

Indifferent should the smile or frown 

                                    Of beauty be. 

   If thou regret'st thy Youth, why live? 

       The land of honourable Death 

Is here:—up to the Field, and give 

                                    Away thy breath! 

   Seek out—less often sought than found— 

       A Soldier's Grave, for thee the best; 

Then look around, and choose thy Ground, 

                                    And take thy rest.

Dying of a violent fever four months later it is wondered how exactly Byron may have foreshadowed his own death so easily?

For had he been dealing with this world weariness already for much longer? 

The clubbed foot, the sensitivity of the hand and the mind?

It is something TS Eliot called an immature sensitivity.

It led Byron to sleep on the Greek terrace.

It led him to the sublime.

Love being the generative capacity for action, allows man to overcome illness, and those struggles of human life that poetry helps transcend. Poetry being the most generative art being a purified form of human sincerity (the most pure form of human sincerity being love). It forces one to think on one’s own feet and to find health in a body constrained by the chains of God.

The fundamental relationship between genius is not a deterministic dualism of health and habit. That which aspires towards the avoiding of the perception of time. Love does not generalize, but it speciates as it does in poetry, created fragmented and individual harmonies.

Harmony has no need towards expansion. There is no entropy in love nor the measure of harmony. The body for the poet becomes non-dual, thought the world may be single or two, with heaven and earth, or heaven being on earth. That which one does with their health and future under heaven being as disparate as the I Ching, and for it’s study more the importance. That poetry allows for eternal generation. In sickness it causes health.