A late 20th Century survey suggested 8 per cent of the UK adult population had recently written a poem in some manner (of which two-thirds were women*). Source: Writers & Artists Yearbook.
Is it, one wonders, a wholly unrelated statistic, then, to consider the curious correlation that – today – 8 percent of the population of Great Britain meets the criteria for diagnosis for Common Mental Disorders. Source: Mental Health Foundation.
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Prey to mad uncontrollable rages, the poet Paul Scarron (1610-1660) demonstrates the state of mind of one
whose reluctant Muse is deaf to all appeals. |
Certainly, today, the Case of the Upublished Poet suggests an as-yet unclassified mania threatening the sanity of possibly over 3 million adults in Britain (or 8 in 100) who suffer as forlorn aspirants, fretful to claim the summit of Mount Helikon or, indeed, Mount Parnassus.
Also, to put it another way, is it conceivable for a common British mental disorder to persist in an unclassified, untreatable compulsion that’s fixated on the composition of poems that remain in the shadows of the psyche, unpublished and unremembered?
AMS. The New Syndrome?
Is a new definition, therefore, demanded to categorise this complaint? Could it be . . . ?
AMS. Absent Muse Syndrome: ‘A Poem : The Unanswered Prayer of the Id in Beseechment of the Super Ego.’ (Catherine Eisner, 2025.)
Or is this, actually, the definition of ALL poetry, whether by adepts or also-rans, published and unpublished? One has to ask.
As to Complaints.
Did not Edmund Spenser publish, in his 1591 collection Complaints, the poem Teares of the Muses? It would seem this work is the earliest sighting of Absent Muse Syndrome since the poet characterises the Muses – Clio, Melpomene, Thalia, Euterpe, Terpsichore, Erato, Calliope, Urania, and Polyhymnia – as sorrowers lamenting the shameful decline of Spenser’s fellow Men of Letters.
The Prosodic Pathogen and Pentacostal Tongues.
In many respects, this hidden psychiatric disorder recalls Typhoid Mary, who famously was asymptomatic yet a carrier of the typhoid pathogen.
So may we imagine the unpublished poet as an asymptomatic carrier of the prosodic pathogen? By definition, is such an unfortunate individual a carrier who’ll never witness the fever of presenting the full-blown disease yet one who’s condemned to speak in pentacostal tongues unheard?
There can be no consolations, then, for sufferers of unrequited bardic passion, we may conclude.
But . . .
The Anon Canon. The Anon Invocation.
Consider the rivalry of the authors, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Horace Smith in their contest to write Ozymandias. One effort is regarded as a received classic in the canon of English Poetry, the other is a historical footnote. Yet, does not Smith’s own coda to his Ozymandias have a haunting sonorousness quite the equal of Shelley’s?
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Yes. Be assured. Together with Horace Smith, overshadowed neglected poets should, with excusable pride, claim membership to their own canon . . . the lost canon of a most powerful Unrecorded Race of Versifiers.
And, should you admit to sharing the woes of those blighted by Absent Muse Syndrome, you are directed to adopt without delay this not inefficacious AMS invocation evidently once composed to awake an intransigent muse . . .
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire!
Your Concord Flight Plan: Destination Parnassus.
The idea of two states of mind coexisting and coequal, which confer the acuity of perceptual duality can be, perhaps, best demonstrated by aviation technology and the concept of the Artificial Horizon and its ADI – Attitude Display Indicator – to guide the pilot.
In the Poet’s search for Attitude, the Poet must emulate the Pilot and recognise and respect two ways of seeing Their Horizon from the pilot’s Point-of-View in the cockpit.
In general, the Inside-Out Convention has been adopted by commercial and military aviation for viewing the Artificial Horizon on the ADI, a concept that provides a moving horizon to gives a consistent frame of reference for a pilot seated at the controls, although it’s a visualisation that does not mimic the angle of the wings in the mind’s eye. (In the diagram the angle of the horizon is mimicked and the aircraft banks in reality. The moving part consists of a two-colour moving background defining earth and sky.)
More commonly adopted by aviation in the East, the Outside-In Convention reverses the action of the moving part; the horizon is static and the bank angle is an active representation of the angle of the wings. Despite the ‘Inside-Out’ set-up dominating Western aviation, the superiority of the ‘Outside-In’ convention is often cited in respect to the possible diminishment of comprehension in the case of an emergency recovery manoeuvre from a static bank angle displayed by ‘Inside-Out’.
In fact, a senior Concord pilot of my acquaintance comments: ‘I might have liked the “outside in” provided the real horizon is not about to appear! It all depends on what one is used to. “Chacun a son horizon” as they say in France.’
Well. Amen to that.
So what more can one add on the question of Knowing One’s Place in the World of Versification except this: ‘Everyone has their own horizon and to each I wish, “Happy landings!” ’
* ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.’ ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.
See also
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2)
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 5)
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 6)
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 7)
Catherine Eisner believes
passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary
craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and
psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and
ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines
Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from
psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive
recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry,
rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and
the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
