Why Are Female Poets Nuts?

I came on it in two ways. The first occurred last Sunday, when I was coaching a student on a poem by a poet unknown to me: Jane Kenyon. Paradoxically, the poem is called Happiness:

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                  It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Well, it was that image, that “wineglass, weary of holding wine,” that stuck in my mind. So much so, that it wasn’t the name of the poet but her image of the wineglass that allowed me to track Kenyon down.

And if Kenyon knew about happiness, it was hardly the neighbor who dropped every morning for coffee, gossip, and laughter. For Kenyon, happiness was the ghost she saw slipping into an abandoned house at dusk.

How depressed was she? Well, consider a famous poem: Having it Out with Melancholy. The first stanza clues you in pretty quickly:

When I was born,

you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery,

and when we were alone, you lay down

on top of me, pressing

the bile of desolation into every pore.

Kenyon, born in Ann Arbor but living in New Hampshire, died early at age 47 from leukemia. But the question troubling my afternoon today is whether she also suffered from the Sylvia Plath effect.

The idea goes back to Aristotle, if not before, but got named in 2001 by James C. Kaufman; Wikipedia has this to say about it:

Kaufman's work further demonstrated that female poets were more likely to suffer from mental illness than any other class of writers. In addition, female poets were more likely to be mentally ill than other eminent women, such as politicians, actresses, and artists.

Well, looking at the 20^th century, it’s not hard to see that there were seriously troubled women out there, often writing extraordinary poetry. Besides Plath, there was Anne Sexton, Sara Teasdale, and not so much a raft as a cruise ship of others.

Writing, in fact, is on the list of the ten most depression-prone professions. But it seems that female poets outstrip all others for being nuts. Why?

Well, unless you have the fortune to be born with…well, a fortune, poetry is a pretty awful profession. And what happens if you don’t particularly want or like to teach?

You’re also digging, digging into some of the messiest terrain around—your own psyche. Worse, there’s the terrible fact that there is all too often an inverse relationship between a poem’s intrinsic worth and its financial worth. Which is to say that bad poetry sells.

Then there’s not much support out there for being a poet. Novels are sexy, everybody venerates a Hemingway or Steinbeck. But a poet, who has produced a slim little book of sixty poems or so—the fruit of two years of sitting alone with her thoughts and feelings? It sort of pales next to a 600-page novel.

Right—so now we get to chicken and egg: does the poetry create the madness, or do crazy people decide to become poets? Well, the age-old question has now been solved, and by a Harvard man no less. Here, from the American Psychological Association, is what the authors have to say:

There isn't a link between mental illness and the actual process of creating, says psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg, MD, of Harvard Medical School, who has studied Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners and other highly creative individuals. Rather, he argues that mental illnesses such as anxiety, thought disorder and depression disrupt the cognitive and emotional processes necessary for successful creativity.

I agree—but there’s something that has to be acknowledged: it may be that the depression of creative people is distinct from the depression of the rest of us. Business people, plumbers, doctors have some external yardstick against which they can measure themselves. But creative people—and especially artists and poets—have no such thing. The question, “am I any good?” awaits by the bedside in the morning, perches on the shoulder for the rest of the day, sours your morning coffee, and stalks you, side by side, throughout the day.

It was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life—resolve the issue with the cello, that had led to self-inflicted bites on my arms, and three or four spectacular choked auditions. In the space of two or three weeks, I went through madness and came out the other end.

Two or three weeks?

Sorry—a lifetime….