“It has often been remarked that there is a side at which genius and madness touch, and even pass over into each other, and indeed poetical inspiration has been called a kind of madness: ‘amabilis insania,’ Horace calls it,” Arthur Schopenhauer famously wrote in “The World as Will and Representation.”
Poetic amabilis insania descended on two iconic American poets, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, on the night they wrote their famous poems in praise of insanity — the subtle art of breaking free of the stultifying straightjacket of rational thinking.
Unnarrated, so you can listen with your heart, hear with your body, and comprehend with your soul. Please meditate!
MUCH MADNESS IS DIVINEST SENSE
by Emily Dickinson from “The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson“Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –
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ONE HOUR TO MADNESS AND JOY
by Walt Whitman from “Leaves of Grass“One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
a determin’d man.O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
untied and illumin’d!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and
you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth!
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.O something unprov’d! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.
Complement these best poems about insanity by Dickinson and Whitman with our article on how to read a poem.
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