“All poets are insane,” says Robert Burton. Insanity as in the very word speaks of discredit, unreliability, and somewhat or precisely a dangerous source of perspective of one’s own experience that is put out in poetry. A calculation of words that projects healing from morbid existence. Is it then true that suffering and poetry are related? Or is it to negate and perpetually ridicule poetry and poets in their finest forms?

Madness and poetry have been coaligned quite often in the art, and both often the consequence of one another. Haven’t we all heard it? A mad person locked up in an asylum produces great literature, or a person locked up because of their great literature? It is to say that suffering and poetic ingenius are connected. But should we call all poets ‘Imaginative lunatics’? Or some harsher synonym condescending in nature? Or which such obvious opium addicts serve the irrational minds? Psychologically manipulative ecstatics or plain daydreamers who see the world with a stained glass lens? Not necessarily red but could be unpleasantly grey. Mad mad poets and their hallucinative poetry. Or the tortured poets department? wink wink

We might just call poets ‘too passionate for their own sake.’ Their minds carry heroes on mountain peaks, romanticising war, external and of the human mind, and just simply studying the flamboyant pleasure of feeling, yet they are almost always distinguished as opium smoking romantics. Perhaps that is truly why poetry seems to be infused with such blurry opium glow, to fictionalise and immortalise dreams.

But one cannot deny one important point of notice, poets are clever. Their minds carry awful amounts of wit and enthusiasm that can change the world with words, and that is why such immortality, such passion takes form into pure art. It is through this magic of poetical genius we connect characters, tropes and traumas, to put forth a whole other world. 

Imagine a successful poet, a man, a lawfully correct, however much opium-possessed-he might-be poet, a fortunate poet, who is not insane but uses his insanely marked reputation as clever writing, which makes great writing for decades and centuries to come. He is a madman but a celebrated one, who just loves the pleasure of feeling deeply! Someone who might be tortured but never tortures the reader, who rhymes and lets great people find beauty in his rhythmic writing. But then imagine a female poet in the same position, a poetess talented to her wits end, a great writer who puts a new world in front of you, takes you on a journey to discover the realms of womanhood, a devoted artist, and then imagine the discouragement, imagine the pain of being the poet, the artist, imagine the suffering and her own imagination, and imagine the Madwoman she is bound to create.

Insanely so, for the Madwoman, medicine and psychology, have always been patriarchal. They analysed hysteria as a female disease entirely. And so, in relation to the thought of poetry, a prominent psychologist, James C. Kaufman calls it ‘The Sylvia Plath Effect’, precisely marking female poets as more vulnerable to experiencing mental illness than other writers. But psychology has always been biased? Who could ever forget or forgive Freud?

But we certainly are not here to discuss him. Here’s a short background of hysteria much earlier than Freud: In the medical texts of ancient physician Hippocrates, Hippocratic Corpus On the Nature of Woman, of the fifth or fourth century BCE, Plato’s ideas of hysteria are studied. Hystera meaning ‘womb’ in Greek, and being ‘hysterical’ is identified as a neurotic ailment, caused by the ‘dysfunction of the uteri.’ It happens when the womb is left barren bringing suffering to the body, until it is treated by ‘love’ which they suggest is only ‘sexual pleasure’, and it is thus pinned that ‘such is the nature of woman and all that is female’. Hippocrates’ medical deduction presents the theory that women being deprived of sexual pleasure become hysterical in their need to be satisfied. It is the assumption of patriarchy that puts hysteria in the consequences of ‘exaggerated femininity.’ Again, ‘too passionate for her own sake.’ And for which their treatement was to deprive them from any humanly desire at all. Given the harsh therapies that male doctors approved for women who were conditioned with “hysteria,” such as electric shock therapy, hypnosis, the usage of horrific sexual machines, etc., hysteria developed as a result of the social trauma that women experienced, and the treatment made them into “madwomen.” (Hippocrates) 

Consequently, the Madwoman has been a strong trope in literature and culture. Most times she is a maneater, the femme fatale, infatuated by successful men in suits and luxury. She is out to seduce, manipulate, cause disaster and sink her serpent-like teeth into the flesh of men around her, ofcourse use them to her own advantage and then cry about it. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

But then ask how the female narrative puts things into perspective as a much needed reply, it is something that we now call, female rage. Blend female rage with poetry and fame then, you might get someone incredibly aware of her power, someone with an agenda of what she wants and is out to get it no matter what it takes, a true Madwoman, a clever poet, and someone with a big reputation. (*wink wink* but we’ll get to her in a moment).

In this poetic insanity, feminine writing is of vital purpose. In which case when women do take charge of language, they might be too eccentric or what’s the word? ‘Delusional’ for their own sake. This is where female rage comes into place.

Female rage is birthed against well structured androcentric, and dare I say common, literature. From the Madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre, stripped away from telling her own narrative, too monstrous, eccentric and out to kill you, and must be treated in a gruesome way, the narrative is shifted with one of the first feminist texts by Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, who is trapped in an asylum by her scheming husband, yet writes a novel to reclaim her story,  or tortured by the men around her, Esther Greenwood from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, goes through electroshock therapy in a mental institution and rebels with life enriched in misogyny, or the very author herself, Sylvia Plath and her struggles with mental illness and greatly paving way for the literature of the Madwoman.

Or let us get to poetry directly, dissecting two poets who have used the Madwoman reputation wickedly so. (Alright enough with the hints) Of course, the ‘tortured poet’, is a vital one of them.

Whether Taylor Swift has or has not suffered mental illness is not the subject here, the fact is that scrutiny to her work has always been large, along with her success in the music industry. Playing at her femme fatale reputation in Blank Space, or becoming  The Man, of her own narrative, has caused quite the stir. Which is precisely why it is so important to talk about her narrative in the realm of the Madwoman.  

Swift has had a vital impact in the discourse of female rage. The namesake, Madwoman connects deeply with female rage on the front. Calling herself the ‘madwoman’ bursting with flaming ‘scorpion stings’ and ‘bear claws.’ The rage that speaks as a response to subversion and misogyny becomes a threat itself. A threat that one needs to put ‘a noose around’, like hunting a witch. It all exists in the label, of being mad, ‘everytime you call me crazy, I get more crazy,’ just like the ones tortured by the label of hysteria, for the ironical lack of proper feminine behaviour, or an out of ordinary, imaginative, mindful yet irrationally strangeness of femininity, who might as well be a great writer!

‘No one likes a madwoman,

You made her like that.’

The Last Great American Dynasty takes the life of a real socialite who was labelled a Madwoman with her reputation and sanity at question. She is the villain, ultimate femme fatale rising from the ashes, to take revenge.

 ‘There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen,

She had a marvelous time ruining everything.’

In the case where poetry and femininity interact, names like Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift mark a bridge between centuries of literary and lyrical narratives. In Plath’s poems like Lady Lazarus, Daddy and Medusa, Plath directly calls the patriarchal world a masochist. ‘It’s theatrical,’ the ‘peanut crunching crowd’ that watches her in her agony and fails to rescue her from her psychosis drives her into insanity. The famous lines,

‘Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair 

And I eat men like air.’

It is an empowering statement that echoes female rage and some might say femme fatale energy. 

Daddy exemplifies this female rage rather vigorously from 

‘I have lived like a foot

 For thirty years,’

a transition into, 

‘Daddy I have had to kill you.’ (Plath, Ariel) 

We could put Reputation in the perspective of the Madwoman theme as well. I Did Something Bad, a typical femme fatale grin at the ones who are out to burn her just like the witches during the witch trials, people falsely accusing women left and right, damaging their reputations, controlling their fates, driving them insane and burning them at stake.

 ‘They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one.’

And in the very same context, Plath details her imagination of being englufed in fire as the accused witch in the poem Witch Burning.

‘Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches.
Only the devil can eat the devil out.
In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.’

In all witchy context then, let’s take a cauldron and brew ourselves a taste of the Madwoman. Let us sprinkle the salts of mental strife, the potions of weaponry that mark significantly flavourful wounds and put fire to it. Next add some poetic insults fresh from your home-grown garden, just as much that sparks a boil, and brew the potion till it darkens like the color of the cauldron. Then pour it through a sieve so all the humanly desires are left out, into a jar and label it ‘mad.’ Cover it up tightly with a lid, because it will explode, (also we wouldn’t want it going bad now) and then put it on the closest shelf so it doesn’t stay out of reach, but locked away, always staying in fear of ever consuming it directly, becoming a victim to the poison, because trust the enchanted cauldron, it will be bitter. And viola! We have ourselves a Madwoman. Call her Plath or Swift or any mad poet who fits the description.

Since all poets are mad, and most female poets tend to be vulnerable to being mad in their own capacities, the crazy and wild yet predictable part is, the jar will inevitably explode. Its aim will only be to poison misogyny. Hence, the poetic self expression of the Madwoman is female rage in its raw form. The Madwoman creates a whole other world inside that jar, a sip and you could be eternally transformed, engulfed into what they might call the Madwoman’s feminism, a world, a lore, a culture that persists above common literature. And perhaps this is what makes a truly great poet, madness. And this madness is one which stems from an ambition, the vengeance of the femme fatale, and of the witch. 

And so, must I conclude, all poets are mad, madness is a poetic story, and the story of the accused, the female, the opium smoking Madwoman, who sits in a leather seat in a black suit, with her armoured typewriter and a red lip, is indeed a cunning one. She is aware of the imaginative lunacy she’s capable of (and perhaps, or indeed she enjoys it more than you could imagine). The mad poet looks at the crowd that calls her a witch, with a blank stare and ready to strike.

And perhaps we might agree, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” True that. And we wouldn’t want to mess with the Madwoman.