Weininger, suicide, intense delusions
Coleridge, mental instability
Samuel Johnson, melancholia-dyspepsia, heard voices, suffered from mental confusion
Blake, went mad
Lincoln, suicidal, melancholic
Sherman, mental breakdown
Scott Fitzgerald, mental instability, total breakdown later in life
Bunyan- intense religious experiences, dream visions
Cromwell- religious hallucination
Milton- extremely vivid inspired religious dreams
Swift- intense temperamental problems,
Orson Welles- suicidal thoughts, described his inner life as "an abyss"
Nietzsche- visual hallucinations on closing his eyes, wept on imbibing alcohol, extreme dyspepsia
Carlyle- melancholic dyspepsia
Melville- chased his wife with a kitchen knife
Tolstoy- intensely suicidal, had to be monitored, intense depression and desperate religious conversion
Carlyle- dyspepsia-melancholia
HL Mencken- "superrational atheist" was in reality severely anxious and superstitious, suffered some melancholic dyspepsia
Joyce- tactile and olfactory hallucination, alcoholism
Flaubert- extreme pessimism and severe anxiety, called himself afraid of life, pederast
Jonathan Edwards- powerful religious swoons
Oscar Wilde- mentally unstable, pederast
Edgar Allan Poe- semimad lovesickness
Why are the best writers all mentally damaged?
Cuz that's how ya make A R T
Y happy man be no artist????
Because there is alot of documentation on famous authors therefore alot of their shit tends to come on the surface.
Alot of dumb cunts probably have as many issues but certainly nobody gives a shit.
I think it leads them to a dissastifcafion with reality, which in turn leads them to create their own...
>Art is this weird therapeutic thing; you’re supposed to actually do it so you don’t have to do it anymore. You should get to a place where you’ve expelled it. Anybody that says that they’re an artist and keeps repeating the mantra like if they say it enough times it’ll be the case, there’s an insecurity there. They use that as a safety net but it’s also a crutch. They’d rather be “artists” than be happy and actually purge. God forbid they should stop making “art.” So they use their misery and their hardship as a sort of grist for the creative mill, and that’s a completely retarded thing. And everybody encourages it. It’s juvenile, but that’s what we expect from our artists. We infantilize them; we don’t want to see them act responsibly.
Everyone pulls out this cliche. In a list of ten famous authors, you're unlikely to get five sane ones. Meanwhile, this sort of mental issues doesn't even plague two percent of the general population.
Well said.
All other answers in this thread are shit.
Name six mentally sound poets who wrote in English.
>adversity builds character
>exceptional people tend to be bizarre / mentally ill
pick both
Shakespeare
Whitman
Larkin
Spenser
Hughes
Tennyson
Whittier
>Shakespeare
We know very little about his inner life. However, he wrote quite a bit about madness.
>Tennyson
Literally suffered from intermittent spells of madness
It's telling that you had to include Whittier and Larkin in a list of poets.
>extreme pessimism
>mental damage
When will the optimists just stop
>Tennyson
Failed already
Nice comic tbqh
>Bunyan- intense religious experiences, dream visions
>Milton- extremely vivid inspired religious dreams
how is that deranged
None of those traits was strong enough to interfere with their work in a crucial manner. We're full of scars.
Are these the only examples you can come up with pham? I'm curious for more.
great quote thank you
No problem, Ariel is unexpectedly very wise sometimes
Some degree of alienation from your social setting is a necessary condition for becoming a great author, and mental damage is sufficient to produce alienation.
You can also be a massive eccentric, while not damaged, and produce great art. A lot of the religious authors you're talking about are more strange or just eccentric than actually damaged because they were perfectly functional and even quite joyful in their abberations.
I also think "meloncholy" as well as anxiety, etc, is just a basic human condition and great authors articulate it so well people clinicalize it rather than see it as what it is, also because they are invested in the damage hypothesis.
Every author is an irredimable optimist, no matter how bleak the discourse, the fact these guys write like waiting for something big to happen when they finish its signal of a pure, child like, optimistic soul.
>tfw 53% of US says they're happy or very happy with their lives
>tfw never been above "ambivalent" my entire life
Key word is
>says
Also most people confuse happiness with satisfaction.
Hemingway, Tasso, Salinger, Jung, Grant, Jackson, Bentham
Maybe Harold Bloom lol
You're mom a fag
Suicides:
Ernest Hemingway, Lucretius, Gérard de Nerval, John Berryman, Jack London, Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anne Sexton, Cesare Pavese, Primo Levi, Yukio Mishima, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Hunter S. Thompson, Leonid Andreyev, Hart Crane
Generally Screwed Somehow:
Tolstoy: Thought about suicide all the time. Ran away from his wife aged 82.
Proust: Asthmatic, germophobic loner mama’s boy faggot.
Dickens: Bipolar insomniac who was afraid of bats. Said his characters introduced themselves to him in his sleep.
Dostoevsky: Epileptic, borderline personality disorder, gambling addiction, scared of being buried alive.
Gustave Flaubert: Pessimistic asshole, hated everyone and everything, FRANKED a young Turkroach boy
Joseph Conrad: Miserable pollack, tried to kill himself with a gun
Kafka: Nervous kike, cringey irl, totally fucked in the head.
Horace: Depressed
Chaucer: Aggressive cunt, charged with beating a friar in London, and with rape in 1380
Boccaccio: Failed at fucking - turned full-blown woman-hater
Li Bai: Drunken chink who drowned to death trying to grab the moon’s reflection in the water from his boat
François Villon: Murdered a priest, assaulted others, was a burglar who ended up banished like the faggot he was
Montaigne: Hid in a tower for 10 years
Torquato Tasso: Persecution mania, went insane, committed to asylum for 7 years
Jonathan Swift: Gloomy bastard, misanthrope, said he only laughed twice in his entire life, didn’t speak to anyone for a whole year, went mad in 1742.
Voltaire: Chronically constipated frog, drank 50 cups of tea a day, spent16 hours a day in bed writing.
Samuel Johnson: Monstrously cantankerous fucker, Tourette syndrome, rude manners
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Admitted to being an exhibitionist
S.T. Coleridge: Drug-addict
Byron: Sex-maniac, even fucked his half-sister
John Keats: Sad motherfucker, attempted suicide
Balzac: Crazy bastard, glutton, lived life in dressing gown
Hans C. Andersen: Wimpy crybaby hypochondriac
Edgar Allan Poe: Depressed, alcoholic drug addict who married a 13 yo
Gogol: Went insane
Nabokov: Paedophile narcissist
Euripides: Recluse, misanthrope, hated women
Virgil: Weakling manlet, once held a lavish funeral for a pet fly. Died after being in the sun a bit.
Herman Melville: Had a mental breakdown in 1855
Charles Baudelaire: Sexual deviant, depressed, drug addict
Emily Dickinson: Agoraphobic
Lewis Carroll: Pedo
Mark Twain: Bitter fucker, smoked up to 40 cigars a day
Maxim Gorky: Bitter fucker 2.0, attempted suicide
James Joyce: Awkward bastard, phobias of thunder, firearms (faggot) and dogs
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tiny dick couldn’t satisfy Zelda, alcoholic, attempted suicide via morphine overdose
Samuel Beckett: Bitter fucker, recluse – didn’t even leave house to get Nobel Prize
Tennessee Williams: Drunkard
Dylan Thomas: Drunkard
>Whitman
homosexal