Stephen Fry on Poetry and Depression

Stephen in your book on poetry the old les trois you write for me the private act of writing poetry is songwriting confessional diary keeping speculation problem-solving storytelling therapy anger management craftsmanship relaxation concentration and spirit spiritual adventure all in one inexpensive package it occurs to me if that's really true and we could package poetry this would be of enormous benefit for the entire nation solely for the national health because it's cheap as they say don't forget the first two words of that quotation for me for me yeah that's the thing and and I'm sure it wouldn't necessarily apply to others music may to others all kinds of other things may exercise you know I mean someone who's been diagnosed as bipolar and and so I've been more ever since that diagnosis it's been very much more attentive to what seems to help or not help my mind and when I was not diagnosed I was very inattentive and just did things to feed my mood which was stupid drugs and alcohol but when you stopped doing that things get a bit better but you still have left these mood issues that anyone with bipolar disorder will have and so you you value anything that seems to take the mania down a spot but also seems to help you when you're feeling very black and it may just be that I'm someone who has a high doctrine of language and a verbal expression probably as a result of being physically inept and not being able to sing or play musical instruments or paint so it's all I got left but therefore at least it seems language and poetry which is one takes to be the highest expression of language is a natural way for me to both to to grapple with demons but also to to escape from them actually using what diamond is interesting doubly Jordan a great poetic heir of mine when asked whether he would get rid of his demons through poetry said no no I don't want to get rid of my demons or my Angels will fly away too and I don't know whether that's true but certainly because you can express ideas in an unusual way when you're a poet you can express your feelings the turbulence within you you can go beyond the usual descriptive words like storm or whatever they might be and find other other ways of describing how you feel or confronting how you feel and poetry I think of that allows that better than those things and the process for you I'm just guessing it might involve a notebook in a pencil very much so yeah the standard moleskin and pencil approach again WH Auden at his best in I think it's a dyers hand which is collection of his essays and criticism and he writes about how to be a poet and he says all poets generally like their own handwriting it's like smelling their own farts but anyway yes I'd like my handwriting I very fond of typing into computers but not for poetry seems seems to direct transmission from the through the brain to the hand to the the eye as you write is important and I you know I'd be honest when trouble is when one was depressed the first thing to go from is energy well that was the next thing I was going to ask that the you know often people when they're depressed would say well I I couldn't even pick up a book I couldn't even sort of read the newspaper let alone read something as demanding as a poem let alone do something as demanding as a sit down right yeah no I agree I don't think I've ever written a poem when I'm depressed but what I have done well I've learned to do it's helpful for anybody else is to write down words just in the your words doesn't matter what they are and they can be very very hard I mean you know basket or something or tiles or something they don't seem necessary to be connected with that one's feeling but they're just words that are in one's head you write them down you write as many as you can and then maybe when with any luck it isn't too too far away some sort of change or stabilization comes over you and you have a little bit more energy you can look at those pages and you can think that's interesting and you can actually find a way of putting them together what about sort of reciting words or even lines in homes in your head one of the people we've spoken to for this course is Rachel Kelly who's written a wonderful book about how poetry helped her through depression and for her there's something about the sort of the repetition of lines of poetry that were sort of ingrained in her memory that that were just gave her something to hold on to is that an experience you've ever had completely I I have certain lines as one and never leaves me keeps lying that Madeleine asleep in that of legends old I I'd say that it's it's a I don't know what it is it's it's a sort of touchstone for me it's a rather amazing line there's a progestin progression of ELLs and Dee's ago it's symmetrically through its and I kind of hugged myself we went really low and I didn't in asleep in Napa Megan's own it partly I have a picture creates a total pitch and a lot of Keats does of course because he was very inspirational for pre-raphaelites artists and things and you can see Madeleine asleep in lap of legends old and it's a comfort it's a comforting idea I don't know I'm sure a psychiatrist could explain why that particular line is the one that I always say but yeah the part of the pleasure of poetry is the crunch and feel of words in your mouth and as they hit the tip of the tongue to me they resound and it's it's important I think to you know to enjoy all of those sometimes sometimes you you have a kind of equivalent of photosensitivity or audio sensitivity in which everything's too loud seems to and the poetry is the last one to be an annoyance I find in quite the way that other things are like like music or even pictures could be annoying to you got a passage here from Robert Frost Frost was a depressive he had a pretty tough life his father died of TB when he was 11 his mother died of cancer when he was 26 his mother had depression he had depression his wife had depression his only son committed suicide one of his daughters died of cholera when she was 8 another daughter died in childbirth another daughter he had to commit to a mental hospital I mean it's pretty well it's very clear depressed and then he was killed in there in the war but um Frost was a great believer in the importance of poetic form he famously said that he he said I'd sooner write free verses play tennis with the net down you sort of you need the net for a good game of tennis and frost believed you needed form in order to craft the poem he wrote a wonderful little short three-line poem it's called pertinax it goes let chaos storm let cloud shapes swarm I wait for form the the rhyme gives him the form but he reflected once about the importance of form he says we see forms in nature all around us and then he says when we are in doubt there is always form for us to go on with anyone who has achieved form is lost to the larger excruciation z-- I think it must stroke faith for the right way the artist the poet might be expected to be the most aware of such assurance but it is really everybody's sanity to feel it and live by it and I thought that was a wonderful phrase that somehow creating form he goes on and gives examples of weaving a basket writing a letter making a garden putting the furniture in your room in a good order or above all writing a poem there's all things that give for to the chaos of life and somehow it is everybody's sanity to live and feel by it and that somehow if you can achieve form then the large excruciation yes breathing really sort of doubt about the meaning of life in a sense can disappear does that resonate it does it reminds me also the Seamus Heaney's idea of drilling the potatoes you know they're getting there that order that sense of yeah I think a lot of people will relate to that and the idea of tidying your desk tile you know brahmic is already back to when you were a child there's something to do with the anxiety and the terror and the guilt of being a child and with a messy bedroom that you just stick with it gets worse and worse and then then eventually you have this frenzied attempted to ideate and you there's a belief though that you invest so much in the idea of order around you in order to be able then to progress to creativity but doesn't work that I'm reminded also of Freud's great comment wherever I go I find a poet has been there before me and it's a sort of modern version of poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world they are actually there's something about poetry does take you to places whether it's order I suppose the act of making a poem is is an act of order it's an act of defiance to the turbulence that so even if it isn't in exactly of in form it's that like tent uses famous thought Fox there's the white page or the white lawn and you print you make a difference you you make something it's suddenly there it wasn't there before this idea has has has has all your all the the Maelstrom has focused the tornado was focused into a point which is actually quite still and it's writing on the page there's that huge huge churning tornado and it's actually a pen and it's just focused down into a sort of stillness quietness the other quote that I love a little bit like the Freud one is it keeps again we seem to talk to a lot about he says that a poem should strike us I'd strike us the reader as a wording of our own highest thoughts and almost a remembrance and I think that's brilliant it's that yes that's what it means that's how it is that's how I feel I sort of remember that but I've never been able to word those highest thoughts yes at the end of all exactly it is yeah there is that strange feeling is to have arrived at the place we started and to know it for the first time and poets can refresh an experience completely like and yet it's something we've always known and it is a tremendous thing that all art can do but I think perks do it somehow better than anyone is is to take you to a place that you've always known and you've never dared go or you've never realized was available for you to go oh it's okay there's a kind of acceptance it is and when you're when you're reading the poem when you're in the poem you're in that place in that moment and a lot of other things just just fall away they do they absolutely do I wish I could say that I had a list of poems or poets who are good for depression good for mania or good for any kind of mental disease I don't think it quite quite works like that I think I think one can be tremendously solaced or comforted by a poem that's just charming and sweet about nothing too terrible or one can be incredibly depressed by such a poem because it's it's too pretty you know so I don't think there's a rule as far as I can tell there isn't obviously be something that in our culture a publisher would say come on I want a book I want an anthology of books for people with mental come on it doesn't work doesn't work really doesn't it would be an act of betrayal and dishonesty to suggest that there were poems that work because it's so personal both mental health problems mean bipolar disorder is personal and poems of personal Steven I asked you to come along and talk about a couple of poems that have helped you in dark times and slightly to my surprise you chose two poems that are pretty melancholy john Keats's ode to a nightingale and Philip Larkins Oh bard the Keats poem written at the time his his his brother Tom has died of tuberculosis and Keats is anxious about his own health his mood is very dark but he he's just sitting and he has a nightingale and then the Lark in one it's one of those waking at four o'clock in the morning moments feeling pretty pretty glum about life now it was one of the last poems that Larkin wrote he he really struggled with writer's block towards the end of his life so these these these dark melancholic poems but do they cheer you up what did enough they do about it they have really been to places that I have been but they've made something of it something permanent and remarkable two incredible poems yes knocking was a rather rather downcast miserable list but this poem it's so beautiful he took a long time to write it and you know that every single line is beautifully shaped perfectly made yet not for the sake of artifice and delight but just because he knows no other way this is the way he writes poems this is the way poems for him work is to be perfect and so the the images of the light seeping through the curtains and the outline of the Wardrobe it's it's incredible and then the the angry old man comes through with his his rage about religion which is fantastically expressed this idea that death is death is death there is nothing else and I have to face that and I'm getting nearer it all the time and then this brilliant row sort of organized with the telephones and the postman going the postman coming from house to house like doctors is it's just a brilliant poem and the other thing about it you're talking about it's perfect crafting is it's one of those poems that when you read it you don't notice that it rhyme that's right but in fact it has got a fantastically complex rhyme scheme it's that they're ten line stanzas and you know you've got the first quatrain with the the ABB a then you've got a rhyming couplet and then you've got B a a B or maybe it's the other way yeah but it's amazingly crafted and yet you could read it and it feels conversational it does not feel like rhyme and the rhythm again is it's perfect but it's not Tom two-ton rhythm I mean quite extraordinary it does the argues immense craftsmanship and yes as you said towards the end of his life and that's what the poem is about which is part of the irony of its title a bard is a French form of poetry which is celebrating the dog the dog the most famous Oh bard in English literature is the great sequence in romeo giulia when they're awaking it was the nightingale it was not the Lark you know the the idea of the dawn of the new day yeah but it's a yes it's an amazing piece of work and I think it is as great a testament to him as a man and a poet as there ever was and I do find it therefore uplifting hmm although it's about death it's honest about death well the Keats is also about death but whereas Larkin says death is death oh that's all there is what Keith says is well actually there is something that can outlive death which is beauty the song of the nightingale he says is the same as as the song of the nightingale heard by Ruth in the Old Testament heard in distant lands distant ages and of course the nightingale is very much a traditional figure of of the poet the poetic art of music I mean have been poems about nightingales ever since the ancient greens so Keats isn't away saying we can actually cheat death we can cheat melancholy through art through poetry and although Larkin doesn't say that of course in a way he does because here we are with Larkin dead and his poem alive exactly right and that's the joy the transcendent joy of poetry I mentioned it before when we were talking about Shakespeare's famous 18th sonnets and and you know so long as men can breathe the noise can see so long lives this and this gives life to thee and and it's something that Larkin played with both in terms of his own poetry and in the famous eronel tomb for him about the old couple medieval couple holding hands that she serves or unbearably charming a beautiful poem it's just so lovely what what will survive of us is love but actually what survives is the heart yeah exactly and similarly with Keats their beauty is truth truth beauty that's all you need to know in this world all you need to know but we don't all have his ability to transmit beauty we don't but we do know we can all share it I mean just thinking of a Shakespeare sonnet again you know so long lives this and this gives life to V the great thing about Shakespeare sonnet is that he he doesn't actually give us the name of his lover fact you may have had many lovers I'm sure he did but we as readers can possess that poem we can read it to our lover and say this gives life to thee because that sense that when we possess a poem it no longer belongs to the poet it belongs to us and it becomes something very precious for us I think that's right and I think that is an almost a definition of a great artist of any kind is that they befriend their reader or their beholder if they're a painter listen if they're a musician that they welcome you into their world very often when we're young we grow up scared of the names of the big artists there but what a teacher English teacher my school called the big guns that's how I thought of it but you know especially if they were foreign names like Dostoevsky or something you'd think oh these are not for me and I think when one discovers a poem and a poet you realize that they're grabbing you by the that encircling you and they're taking you in and forever from then on you will be part of their world part of their creation part of their achievement part of their looking at things and it will never leave you and that's an astonishing thing in w8 Jordans great elegy on the death of his fellow kwa WB Yeats he says when the eighths dies he has this wonderful line he became his admirers that he's his work lives on in foreign cities through his readers Stephen Fry thank you so much for talking to such a burden

Channel: The ReLit Foundation: reading for wellbeing

Views: 6,829

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Keywords: Stephen Fry, depression, poetry

Id: 7O_GACdRAd4

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018