Tuberculosis and the creative mind / by Arthur C. Jacobson.

  • Jacobson, Arthur C.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Tuberculosis and the creative mind / by Arthur C. Jacobson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    fought the battle which every great [sic] artist has had to fight since time began. This—dimly felt while I was doubtful of my own vocation and powers—is clear as the sun to me now that I know, through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and shall be in life and utterance, a great poet. Clearly written in a pathologically exalted frame of mind. To ascribe such utterances to any other cause would be unchari- table. One must have something besides genius in him to write so, even to one's wife. These exalted ideas were not limited to his poetry. In 1873 he wrote to his father: Several persons, from whose judgment there can be no appeal, have told me * * * that I am the greatest flute-player in the world; * * *. He compares himself with Schubert and Schumann in music and with Keats in poetry. Swinburne was presumably inferior: He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt. Of William Morris he said: He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile. Again: Whitman is poetry's butcher. Huge raw collops slashed from the rump of poetry, and never mind gristle—is what Whitman feeds our souls with. And the trouble with Poe was, he did not know enough. He needed to know a good many more things in order to be a great poet. The foregoing quotations are too evidently odious compari- sons with a certain member of the poet's guild; and all of them show pathological exaltation. Remember that he wrote these things; they were not verbal quips. Sunrise, the last completed poem, written in December, 1880, when the poet was rapidly approaching his end, was com- posed at a time when he was running a temperature of 1040. It is considered the culminating poem, the highest vision of Sidney Lanier. He was then unable to lift his hand and was being fed by his attendants. What he left behind him was written with his life-blood. High above all the evils of the world he lived in a realm of ideal serenity, writes William Hayes Ward. Ralph Waldo Emerson.—The father of Emerson died at forty-two of a consuming marasmus, vainly combated for some months. Ralph Waldo himself was a slender, delicate youth (Hill). He was not vigorous in body as a schoolboy (Loring). There was a family tendency to chest-disease.