Sanity, Madness, Transformation: The Psyche in Romanticism

Alicia Kerfoot is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Ross Woodman’s study of the relationship between Romantic poetry and
discourses of religion and psychology is one of careful attention and
astute interconnections. Woodman looks at how the act of writing poetry
deconstructs the boundary between unconscious insanity and the
possibility for that insanity to become sanity (in specific reference to
Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron) when he states that “poetry is
the sanity of madness.” In his analysis of the way in which Romantic
poetry foreshadows the psychoanalytical thoughts of Jung in relation to
Freud and the literary analysis of Frye in relation to Blake, the author
focuses on the phenomenological rather than the historical meaning of
what it is to be mad. As Woodman himself notes, his study “examines
the states of consciousness that a historical approach only partially,
if at all, reveals in its prescribed moments of blinding
constellation.”

Thus, Woodman’s approach focuses the inner repercussions of insanity
on the imagination of the Romantic poet. You will not find a historical
or cultural contextualization of madness in this book. Rather, Woodman
draws together several separate deconstructions of poetry and identity
in a psychological, religious, and self-referential way. In his
afterword, Joel Faflak traces this characteristic viewpoint to
Woodman’s own social context of the 1960s.

The discussion of madness and poetry in relation to the construction of
the self causes the reader of Sanity, Madness, Transformation to become
increasingly caught up in a world of intense literary connection and
attempted deconstruction and reconstruction of identity that insinuates
the inherent possibility of “madness” in any one psyche. As Woodman
concludes, “what separates poetry from madness is the affirmation of
consciousness itself.” Thus, Woodman brings together
self-understanding and metaphor in order to demonstrate the role that
the (male) Romantic poets play in a futuristic understanding of human
psychological construction.