Poe's Word-Agony

Edgar Allan Poe died under mysterious conditions with days of “irregular” eating and sleeping patterns before his death. “No one seriously questioned the verdict that the culprit was liquor…science in that day being unable to define it further,” says John Walsh in his book, Midnight Dreary.

Poe himself writes in his letters:

But I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long periods of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God knows how much or how long. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity.

In a PBS interview, Dr. Kay Jamison confirms that the “killing sides of manic-depressive illness” are “alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.” She cites her and her colleague’s review of twenty studies of rates of alcohol abuse or alcoholism in patients with manic-depressive illness:

Well, if you ask writers and artists who have depression, severe depression or manic depression, what they feel is important to them about their illness and their moods in their work, what they almost always focus upon is the intensity and the range of emotional expressiveness. Learning from the pain and from the suffering, they experience the sorrow, they experience the despair of the nihilism and so forth. And on the other hand, very ecstatic and visionary states. So that's what artists and writers focus upon.

Creative individuals pour out their best rhetoric from their guts' overflow of pain. Word-agony. And it sears into our beings, cutting us with their suffering, because we've felt it too.

Readers and writers touch. And their touch is music.