Steven M. Weine’s book, ‘Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness’, published last year, has sparked renewed discussions about the connection between mental health and creativity. The questions posed by the book are both literary and sociopolitical. Does mental illness lead to the creation of great poetry? Numerous poets—both well-known and lesser-known, from ancient times to today—have dealt with mental health issues to varying extents. But does this drive literary excellence? How should we approach these questions, which are themselves complex? We should be cautious of the notion of the poète maudit—the cursed or doomed poet—and the tendency to romanticize or even fetishize such poets and their work. Across cultures, there are traditions of viewing “madness” as a source of vision, inspiration, and prophecy. Those labeled as “mad” are often seen as seers speaking truths that challenge the norms of everyday life and disrupt the systems of “civilized” society.
In post-industrial society, the traditions of praising outsiders as poet-seers are more complicated. Weine distinguishes between “madness” as a cultural label and “mental illness” as a clinical term, with the latter being defined by what Michel Foucault called society’s “clinical gaze.” These definitions are influenced by ideological and technocratic changes within societies. A case in point is the United States during the Cold War era, marked by paranoia, segregation, and the Civil Rights and antiwar movements—a society that categorized “otherness” as pathological. During this time, the ideal American citizen was seen as white, middle-class, heterosexual, and family-oriented, with deviations being viewed with distrust and as threats to be subdued or contained for the nation’s security and integrity. Allen Ginsberg described this as a “Syndrome of Shutdown” in which a “healthy” society, in exchange for material abundance offered to a select few, demanded unquestioning conformity and the suppression of individuality, experience, and language.
American poets like Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Elise Cowen, and Wanda Coleman, who all faced mental health issues and addressed these experiences in their art, challenged these societal norms. They highlighted the individual cost of resisting a climate of fear and apathy and revealed the sickness in a society that sought to label and control them. Through their unique poetic styles, they expressed an ethos captured by novelist Jack Kerouac’s words in Belief & Technique for Modern Prose (1959): “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr own experience, language, and knowledge.” As a psychiatrist, Weine brings a unique perspective to Ginsberg’s biography, focusing on the interplay between poetry and Ginsberg’s evolving concept of “madness.”
From an early age, Ginsberg witnessed his mother Naomi’s struggles with paranoid schizophrenia, which led to her spending much of her life in psychiatric hospitals. Ginsberg’s own time at the Psychiatric Institute of the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in 1949, where he met Carl Solomon (the dedicatee of his well-known poem Howl), was a significant experience. It inspired a poetics of compassion and healing that Ginsberg developed over his career.
Howl is a powerful, incantatory expression of witness and lament, calling for human empathy and salvation. The famous opening line, while often quoted, poses an ambiguous question: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked.” Is this “madness” inherent in these “best minds,” or is it inflicted upon them by society? Is the madness actually the madness of society itself? The poem suggests a societal critique in its second section with lines about “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imaginations?” The reference to Moloch, a child-devouring pagan god, symbolizes an oppressive modern society sustained by sacrificing the innocent.
Moloch is depicted as monstrous, with a love for oil, stone, electricity, and banks, and synonymous with a detached intellect that birthed the hydrogen bomb. In this context, retaining one’s humanity by being out of this “Mind” poses a threat to societal norms. Weine observes that Ginsberg saw madness as either liberating or destructive and sought to explore these concepts in his poetry, often using a style marked by expansive, rhythmic lines inspired by Whitman and other poets who reflected on their own struggles with mental health.
Works like Kaddish (1962), a poignant elegy for his mother, demonstrate how Ginsberg further refined his poetics post-Howl. Ginsberg’s countercultural stance was solidified by the 1957 San Francisco obscenity trial over Howl, which brought the “Beat Generation” into the spotlight. Among the Beat poets, Bob Kaufman was a master of jazz-like, surreal poetry labeled as the “Black American Rimbaud” due to the influence of French surrealism on his work. Kaufman’s impromptu performances often landed him in trouble with authorities given the racial and social tensions of the time.
His encounters with the justice system and police, and institutionalization where he faced brutal treatments, had longstanding impacts on his mental health. His poetry, such as Jail Poems, written during imprisonment in 1959, addresses themes of identity and outsider status similar to concepts by W.E.B. Du Bois. Kaufman’s vow of silence in protest against a society that marginalized him reflected a deep struggle with personal and collective identity.
Elise Cowen, connected to Ginsberg both personally and artistically, shared these themes of alienation and mental health, often employing a minimalist style reminiscent of Emily Dickinson. Cowen’s surviving works, fragmented due to the destruction of much of her writing, reveal a poetic voice grappling with both personal and societal crises.
Wanda Coleman, known as the unofficial Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, navigated personal and political landscapes in her poetry, candidly expressing the struggles faced by Black women and the injustices of American society. Her poetry highlighted resilience and protest, demonstrating the transformative power of writing in addressing systemic issues.
These poets, through their unique perspectives and voices, challenge societal norms and provide insights into individual and collective experiences. They reveal truths about society and inspire empathy and understanding, offering a revolutionary human perspective amidst a dehumanizing world.