PATRICK W. SHAKESPEARE

Writing in 1826, Charles Lamb had objected to the correlation, supposedly brought to light by Romantic poetry, between artistic creation and madness. The ‘ground of the mistake’ involved here, Lamb thought, was a failure to draw a clear enough line between sleep and wakefulness; hence ‘men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet’. The notion – today, of course, a full-grown cliché – that genius is close to madness takes no account, Lamb insisted, of the active force of the conscious imagination, a creative activity that ‘implies shaping and consistency’.