MUCH MADNESS: The Horatian Conceit of the Mad Poet in Emily Dickinson

Abstract

The precise sense of the “Madness” from Emily Dickinson’s frequently anthologized poem “Much Madness is divinest Sense” may be more specific than previous explications of the poem have allowed; in fact, one may interpret such madness in the literary poetic context as an allusion to Horace’s impressionistic and somewhat quirky conceit of the mad poet as expounded upon in Ars Poetica. In Horace’s time, writing during the Augustan age in Rome, theories concerning the poet’s inspired madness were ubiquitous. The notion of a divinely inspired poet both afflicted and blessed by madness (μανία) certainly preceded Horace, dating back to Hellenistic antiquity and said to date back to Democritus (Hadju 32). In her paradoxical poem, as a reclusive and largely uncelebrated “poetess” of her time, Dickinson alludes to the mad poet conceit in the opening line, lending much of the gravity of the Western poetic tradition to her own declaration of artistic license. Dorothea Steiner has commented that “[w]hile madness was ‘divinest sense’ in a poet, it was considered an aberration in a ‘poetess’” (59). Certainly Dickinson herself living in a patriarchal, Puritanical era would have been regarded as something of an aberration by many of her peers—“a mad lady who put words together in an interesting way” (Greene 68), but the traditional classical notion of a divinely inspired poetess was not unprecedented https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184245