eally was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of
rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not
because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even
chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of
knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs
of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a
diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great
English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by
logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the
disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could
sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous
necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat
lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by
John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming.
Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough;
it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is
quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that
he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many
strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his
own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it
floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite
sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the
physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise,
to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and
expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his
head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens
into his head. And it is his head that splits.

It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking mistake is
commonly supported by a striking misquotation. We have all heard people
cite the celebrated line of Dryden as "Great genius is to madness near
allied." But Dryden did not say that great genius was to madness near
allied. Dryden was a great genius himself, and knew better. It would
have been hard to find a man more romantic than he, or more sensible.
What Dryden said was this, "Great wits are oft to madness near allied";
and that is true. It is the pure promptitude of the intellect that is in
peril of a breakdown. Al