Trappings and Suits of Woe

There's a moment--in poetry, in culture--when melancholy, the traditional form of sadness, gives way to depression of a more modern and clinical sort. It wasn't Freud, really, but the aftermath of Freud, something in the ever more specialized post-war culture, that signified the shift. Freud was still grounded enough in the classics--he wasn't really a social scientist--and there is something relentlessly romantic about the notion that one's psychological suffering can be identified by its classification via mythology. To see your own anguish in terms of that of Oedipus or Electra is to give a certain dignity and gravity to it that would defy the effects of prescription medication. This is psychological afflication as fate. The shift from sadness as melancholy (grounded either in fate or in a Galenic humor, to be treated historically by bleeding, then by Freud through a cure that is verbal if not essentially literary) to sadness as clinical depression (to be treated--ineffectively, as it most often turns out to the poet--by therapy) occurs with the confessional poets, and at this point I wonder if one could ever go back to the way things were. (We have since made the shift from therapy to drugs, but that is not relevant to the poets I am thinking of--Plath, Sexton, Berryman--who succumbed in the pre-drug era.)

Melancholy is primarily, though not exclusively, a British phenomenon in English-language poetry. We Yankees have been too busy carving out a home in the wilderness--or to wrought in our siamese-twin national obsessions, religion and capitalism--to feel the weight of our sadnesses, and neither Hawthorne's frequent gloominess nor Poe's rabid mania qualify as melancholy. Consider, by contrast, the moodiness of Hamlet, which either stems from a temporary imbalance of the humors (that is, it is situational, resulting from his father's untimely death) or emerges naturally as an innate aspect of his character (which is also his fate, the two terms being nearly synonymous, most of the time, for Shakespeare*). Cranky old Coleridge was not unfamiliar with melancholy, and of course Keats, staring his own mortality in the eyes, knew it intimately. Byron's bravado bears a trace of it. W. H. Auden might be said to be a 20th century inheritor of it, but then he had those religious longings that sidetracked him. Going back, though, even the Beowulf poet, with his grim fatalism, knew it: with every monster defeated, another one sprang up with bloody claws in its wake, and then what do you have? Thus the meadhalls full of warriors sad in their cups, and the keaning laments of the women that so pervade the poem.

As for Americans, we can take as an example of the pre-clinical culture of sadness Robert Frost, a poet whose sober, earthy groundedness sometimes (when he is at his best, I think) gives way to melancholy of a traditional sort. "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening" is perhaps the best instance of Frost's melancholy. Reading this poem as a sort of thinly veiled death wish does, I believe, overshoot the mark. It is not death per se that the speaker is longing for as much as it is a communion with nature that he can only have through death. The speaker is the inheritor not of the British tradition of melancholy (though he possesses melancholy, which we might define as a pervasive sadness, or sadness as a state of being) but rather of an opposite tradition: New England Transcendentalism. His melancholy presents itself in spite of this inheritance, but also because of it. It is worth noting that the Romantic poets in England exulted in nature but were stung by the ephemeral qualities of human experience, by the passage of time and by the inevitability of death. American Romantics--the Transcendentalists--gave us "Thanatopsis" instead--the triumph over death through a communion with nature. Frost is a displaced Thoreau, really, who took a different path in that yellow wood, and in this poem the speaker seems to be lamenting the fact that he cannot be Thoreau in practice. Melancholy then emanates from the poem because it describes a condition of being that cannot be resolved favorably and a pervasive disappointment that results. It also describes--"miles to go before I sleep"--the speaker's resolution to endure this state of being, and this, too, is essential to melancholy. The speaker is not suicidal; he knows how to endure a disappointment, and that is perhaps the very definition of melancholy.

Lowell, Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Bishop--theirs is the poetry of a more modern depressive state. Despite their best efforts to fight it, their sadnesses (and their manic dispositions) drove them mad. The suicide rate alone for the five poets above tells a story: 60%. What kept Lowell and Bishop from joining the others is a tale for someone who knows them better than I do. Perhaps they were better at self-medication. The difference between the melancholics and the depressives clearly emerges from a cultural disposition, not just in the way we treat the sad see themselves or how we treat the sad in our midst but in how we define attitudes toward life. Life, we take it for granted now, is something to be enjoyed. Life in the past was so often something to be guarded or perhaps simply endured: tuberculosis, plague, high infant mortality rates, malnutrition, chimney sweeps who rarely made it to the age of ten. There was plenty to be unhappy about it in the past, but here and now in the land of plenty we feel that if we are not happy, there is something wrong with us. In a modern, industrialized nation, we often feel that there is nothing to separate us from our own unhappiness except for ourselves.

What most separates confessional poetry, though, from its antecedents is the intense awareness on the part of these poets that what they are facing is a clinical condition--and the accompanying notion that poetry itself just might be the therapy they need. This is most clearly the case for Sexton, who literally began writing poetry as therapy. Then there was the realization, for Plath and Sexton at least, that poetry couldn't do it--it couldn't save their lives--and their subsequent suicides.

Consider, by contrast, Keats' treatment of melancholy in his Ode to it. There is joy in life, but it is ephemeral, and its satisfactions leave you dissatisfied with what ensues. A cheap summary of the poem, no doubt, but it gets the central point across: that melancholy is something to be endured. That suicidal despression may be impossible to endure is the subject of another time and another poet.

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* Incidentally, from a modern, deterministic perspective, we could also see character as fate today--product of a biological, genetic, or psychological determination, rather than something astrological, but fate nonetheless.