For Aristotle, poetry was a “medium of imitation.” For Wordsworth, it was “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Among the thousands of definitions of what is certainly one of the western culture’s oldest art forms, one of my favorites is by the 19th-century Romantic essayist William Hazlitt. In his essay “On Poetry in General,” Hazlitt defined poetry as “the language of the imagination and the passions.” One doesn’t have to be a Romantic to understand what he was talking about — Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and Hart Crane’s “Voyages” are proof of what the imagination and the passions are capable of when working at a fever pitch.
Reduced to its most basic level poetry is words, spoken or printed. But that could just as well be a description of a newspaper. As Hazlitt says, imagination and passion are integral to poetry. Put in slightly different terms, poetry is the emotion of sensitive souls born in the imagination and expressed in the language of the heart. Good poems are as compressed as a diamond (Poe’s “To Helen”) or as expansive as a supernova (Dante’s Divine Comedy). Either way, they illuminate private moments and translate them into universal ones. Poetry unlocks deeper insights into what it means to be human.
During a period of self-imposed exile, I moved back to Macon after college. Living with my parents and my English degree, I marveled at how little had actually changed since I left. My mother still cooked the same Southern dishes, my father still grew the same summer vegetables, and Sheriff Andy Taylor, portrayed brilliantly by Griffith, visited the home every late afternoon.
At this point in my life, when I realized the cool, apathetic version of myself I had fabricated in college was counterfeit, I actually started watching The Andy Griffith Show — really watching it with a critical eye. And I learned about myself, my family, and the twin ideologies of progress and nostalgia, which have often been bitter rivals — at least in the South.
Some five years ago, three years after Rosenhan’s death, the New York-based investigative journalist Susannah Cahalan came across his work. ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’ was the only significant scholarship he ever produced, and he lived off this famous paper throughout his career. It occurred to her that it would be fascinating to track down as many of the pseudo-patients as she could, and to explore the circumstances under which Rosenhan had come to undertake his study. The Great Pretender recounts the remarkable investigation that she undertook. The book reads like a fascinating real-life detective story, one whose denouement is only hinted at in its title.