If John Keats were alive today, he would probably a) not die of tuberculosis, b) write the wittiest placards for the doctors’ picket lines, and c) persist in his reverence of melancholia.
That last is perhaps my least convincing claim, if we’re to believe the times make the man. Keats was unusual among the Romantic poets, in that his origins were thoroughly working-class; the result was contemporary reviewers labelling his poetry as ‘vulgar’ and ‘uncouth’. These days, class is less of a barrier to our socially conscious arts spheres, but his ‘Ode on Melancholy’ might face an altogether different challenge.
The pressures of positivity
‘Toxic positivity’ is a river formed of many streams. Capitalism wants us productive, not lying on the sofa poking chocolates through downturned lips. The self-help industry has a tendency to give almost metaphysical import to feelings of love and joy, while pathologising sadness, anger, and other vital areas of the emotional spectrum. Interpersonal relationships put pressure on us to be joyful sons/daughters/parents/partners, out of fear that our misery might reflect badly on those to whom we are closest.
The result is the same: we look upon fits of melancholy with dread and aversion — a far cry from the appreciation Keats evokes in his ode. Can we be sure the poet’s emotional intelligence would survive the cultural norms of our age of enforced productivity?
The benefits of melancholy
To Keats, the melancholy fit falls ‘from heaven like a weeping cloud’. It’s a gift, a lens that allows one to contemplate — with gluttony — a morning rose; the rainbow of the salt sand-wave; the wealth of globed peonies; even the peerless eyes of thy raving mistress.
Melancholy ‘dwells with’ beauty, manifesting as acceptance of the temporary nature of that beauty and providing consolation for the loss of joy, pleasure and delight. It’s the necessary pendulum swing when those phenomena have all come and gone, like party guests who leave the house full of paper streamers, lipstick-stained champagne flutes, and a ponderous silence.
From philosophers to ornamental hermits
Melancholy enjoyed its heyday from Antiquity to the Renaissance, when it was most broadly revered as a tendency belonging to philosophers and creative geniuses. In the seventeenth century, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) elevated the feeling into fashion, and in the eighteenth century a kind of ‘aesthetic cult of melancholy’ arose.
Some proponents took their enthusiasm to rather eccentric lengths. You may have heard of Charles Hamilton, the English gentleman famous for building the landscaped garden Painshill Park. What is less widely known is his incorporation in the garden of a ‘hermitage’— a cave-like dwelling meant to reflect his interest in solitude, contemplation, and indeed, melancholy.
It is said that Hamilton advertised for a hermit to live in the cave for seven years, remaining all the while in a silent and wistful state. The hired man, who, allegedly, was required not to cut his hair and nails, or leave the site, is supposed to have lasted only three weeks before he was found drinking in a nearby pub, with no plans of returning. Hamilton was not starting a trend here, but merely following it: there are many cases of wealthy landowners installing ‘ornamental hermits’ in their gardens, as symbols of the Romantic taste for ruins, gloom, and contemplative solitude.
Melancholy seen as a failure or partial insanity
While you won’t find me advocating a return of the ornamental hermits, I do feel it’s a shame that the following centuries saw the dissolution of the aesthetic cult of melancholy, and an increasing pathologisation of the emotion. French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel labelled melancholy ‘partial insanity’, and German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin refined this to ‘manic-depressive insanity’. The twentieth century failed to shrug off the association of melancholia with severe depression, and even today the two are still intwined.
The issue largely comes down to the pressure on people to function. From the moment we wake to the buzzing or trilling of alarm clocks, we’re on a tight schedule. Breakfast, work, lunch, work, home, dinner. If we’re lucky, we might have a few hours in the day to choose what to do and even then, we’re encouraged to make a productive choice. Perhaps we might get our washing done, take exercise, or pursue a hobby we hope one day to monetise. More likely, we’ll stare at screens and saturate our weary minds with content that we hope will distract us from the absurdity of modern life.
One thing is certain: sinking into melancholy contemplation is viewed as a kind of failure, a submission, a loss of momentum.
Melancholy as a gift
But if Keats is right, then melancholy is really a gift that helps us to contain the ‘wakeful anguish of the soul’. We know, deep down, that all things do end. The daffodils fade; children grow up and grow old; death comes for us all.
Facing this truth is difficult, of course, but it also has immense scope to liberate us from trivial concerns and turn us towards the things that matter in life. Like love, and beauty, and delight, where ‘Melancholy has her sovran shrine’. Seen in this way, melancholy is not a failing, or a paralysis. It’s a reorientation of value in the light of impermanence.
