E. A. Poe: A Study of Creativity and Bipolar

Although scientific studies in recent years connect creativity to bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness), the matter is not “settled” and controversies continue about the relationship between mood disorders and writers of prose and poetry. Edgar Allan Poe said:

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey vision they obtain glimpses of eternity....They penetrate however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the light affable (“Eleonora” in Bartleby).

My position explores “much that is glorious” and perceptive about the ways that the manic-depressive (bipolar), artistic temperament influenced Poe’s creative life and his rhetoric in “The Raven.” His unique stream of consciousness from the well of the manic-depressive temperament brings forth a depth of grief and euphoria that reflects the heightened states (depression and mania), inherent in bipolar sufferers.