The poet
Emily Dickinson rarely left her home after her mid-thirties, and saw few people
aside from her father. When visitors came, she was apt to disappear into her
room, and those who wished to speak with her did so through a closed door.
Rather than interact with neighborhood children, she would send down baskets of
gingerbread from her second story window. In 1874, when she was forty-four, her
father passed away. The funeral was held in the front room of their home; she
did not attend, but listened from her upstairs bedroom. During these years she
created some of the most beautiful lyric poetry ever written in America.
In the
mid-1860s, around the same time as Dickinson’s growing seclusion, the
painter/poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was living alone in Cheyne Walk, London,
where he surrounded himself with peacocks, wombats, kangaroos and other exotic
pets. He began to venture out only at night, and also held seances in which he
tried to communicate with his dead wife. He began to believe that his eyesight
was failing, and thought more and more about his unpublished poems which in a
gesture of love he had buried with her. One October night in 1869 the coffin
was dug up, the manuscript extracted, and the next year Poems by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti appeared in print.
These unusual individuals—as well as their contemporaries
Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nikolai Gogol—had something in common:
they produced a body of extraordinarily creative work while living remarkably
troubled lives. In this book, Dr. Wallace Mendelson, Professor of Psychiatry
(ret) at the University of Chicago, draws on his experience from more than 40
years of research and practice to explore how this came about.
