ld them. Imagination does not breed insanity.
Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad;
but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers;
but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen,
in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does
lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as
wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark
that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had
some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance,
really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he
was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him;
he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles,
like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts,
because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.
Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English
poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic,
by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not
the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health.
He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his
hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and
the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin;
he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men
do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets.
Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him
into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only
some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else.
And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in
his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.
The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats
easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea,
and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion,
like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything
is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only
desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in.
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician
who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head
that splits.

It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking
mistake is commonly supported by a striking misquotation. We ha