JOHN KEATS a report on a presentation 1 by Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., 2 Smooth Sailing, Spring 1995

One of the highlights of each DRADA symposium is a talk by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison on the interplay between affective disorders and the creative imagination. Dr. Jamison studies the life and work of various creative artists for whom there is evidence of a mood disorder. She is coauthor of Manic-Depressive Illness, perhaps the premier medical text in the field of affective disorders, and author of Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. [Both books are available by mail from DRADA.]

At previous symposia, Dr. Jamison has discussed the role of affective disorders in the life and work of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe. Nineteenth-century English poet John Keats was her subject this year, the bicentennial of his birth. Despite his untimely death from tuberculosis at age 25, Keats produced some of the greatest poetry in our language or any other. As seems common among artists with symptoms of manic-depressive illness, he did much of his finest work in a great burst of creative activity (during nine months in 1819).

It is evident from Keats's notes and letters that he was subject to violent mood swings. "I am in that temper," he once wrote, "that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top." But he fought against his illness: "I shall get over my indolent fits."

Trained as a surgeon, Keats embellished his surgery lecture notes with many impromptu sketches in the margins—evidence of his wide-ranging interests, and also of his mercurial nature. Inability to maintain a steady mood characterized his life; though by this own description he was sometimes "lax, unemployed and unmeridian'd," his doctor once diagnosed him as suffering "the too great excitement of poetry."

Keats had already lost both his father and mother by his early adolescence. Financial problems were never absent; his later years were scarred by his own tubercular illness and by that of his brother. Keats was nurse to his brother during his brother's final illness and death—just as the English artist Severn was nurse to Keats in Rome during Keats's final illness. But however hard Keats found his life, he welcomed its challenges. He believed that "real grievances are dis-placers of passion," and faced his very real problems, his suffering and death, with courage and dignity.

"Difficulties nerve the Spirit of Man," he said; they focus the mind on concerns of life rather than letting it wander to darker thoughts. Keats often sank into a "profound disquiet which he could not or would not explain," in the words of a friend, caused by the "motion of the inland sea he loved so well."

Although Dr. Jamison's annual presentations are (to some lay members of the audience, at least) a welcome break from the scientific presentations at the symposium, during the question period someone asked about the relevance of her line of research: Is there any value in examining the illness of artists, past or present?

In answering, Dr. Jamison suggested that someone with a unitary (and relatively fixed) view of human existence may simply not appreciate how arbitrary a construction is reason itself; that ceaseless change is always at work in the universe; and, finally, that reason alone cannot explain the full range of human experience. If we concede that reason is insufficient, then it follows that other means of under-standing are both necessary and desirable. Perhaps the creative artist can serve as an agent of change by receiving and then transmitting human experience in a special way. If an artist cycles in mood more in a short time than others may in a lifetime, Dr. Jamison said, perhaps the proximity of the highs and lows brings to him or her associations that would not otherwise occur. Perhaps another definition of art might be the expression of compressed awareness.

As Keats said,

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. . . . Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse Be poet's or fanatic's will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

1 Presented at the DRADA/Johns Hopkins symposium, Baltimore, Maryland, April 1997

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