POETRY AND PSYCHIATRY

In physical illness, functional and structural integrity of body are the norms for being normal; gauged by scientifically laid down parameters. On a psychological plane, confusion and disagreement hail us as to what constitutes abnormal.

- K. K. SRIVASTAVA

In physical illness, functional and structural integrity of body are the norms for being normal; gauged by scientifically laid down parameters. On a psychological plane, confusion and disagreement hail us as to what constitutes abnormal. Broad agreement exists on normal behaviour with reference to given culture; it caters to the requirements of social expectations, while abnormal does not; exhibiting bizarreness off and on. One's head hums; annoying voices emanating from nowhere persist; one sees demons; weird animals, unpleasant odours refuse to vanish; and even one may encounter what Salman Rushdie calls, in story titled, "The Harmony of the Spheres" about Eliot Crane in his book EAST, WEST, "brainstorms". Literary masters of fictions, plays and poetry, from time to time, kept leaving behind insight into disturbances within seeking outside pouring. For instance, Euripides and Othello's delving into obsessive jealousy and revenge, guilt reaction of Lady Macbeth with her symbolic hand washing to remove 'the smell of blood' or De Quincey's portrayal of 'the world within' under the influence of opium dreams which he describes, 'O heavens! what a revulsion! what a resurrection, from its lowest depths of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me.' The quarrel of these characters was with their own identities; sometimes the quarrel unfortunately leading to suicide or 'the final act of macabre symmetry' as Rushdie calls it, or similarly how poet E. A. Robinson describes Richard Cory: 'gentleman...and admirably schooled in very grace' going home and putting, 'a bullet through his head.' Isolated cases these may seem, still there lurks another side illumining obscure recesses of human psyche. A fertile ground where creativity gets dredged up. Many modern poets attempted to cull out from their own experiences of intense emotional turmoil, the pattern of thought processes symbolic of madness and creativ