I have hesitated as to whether I had a right to include Chatterton among my examples, because I can find no record of his having suffered from actual disease. On the other hand he was so abnormal that I feel that I have no right to ignore him. From his earliest years he was subject to fits of abstraction during which he would sit for hours in seeming stupor from which it was almost impossible to wake him. For a time he was even considered deficient in intellect.
Thomas Hood was a chronic invalid; his most famous poem, “The Bridge of Sighs,” was written on his death-bed. Byron and Swinburne were also physically handicapped.
W. E. Henley was not only a poet but a trenchant critic and a successful editor. A physical infirmity forced him at the age of twenty-five to become an inmate of an Edinburgh hospital. While there he wrote a number of poems in irregular rhythm describing, with poignant force, his experiences as a patient. Sent to the _Cornhill Magazine_, they at once aroused the interest of Leslie Stephen, the editor, and induced him to visit the young poet and to take Robert Louis Stevenson with him. This meeting in the hospital and the friendship which ensued between Stevenson and Henley were famous in the literary gossip of the last century. Henley’s reputation will rest on his poetry, and the best of his poems will retain a permanent place in English literature. As a literary editor he displayed a gift for discovering men of promise, and “Views and Reviews” is a “volume of notable criticism.”
Sidney Lanier, one of the most original and talented of American poets, was consumptive, and Francis Thompson, author of “The Hound of Heaven,” wrote his flaming verse under acute pain.
The Sixteenth Century was the heyday of poets. Princes regarded them as the chief ornament of their courts and disputed among themselves the honor of their company. Ronsard’s life, therefore, was exceptionally fortunate. He enjoyed the favor of the three sons of Catherine de’ Medici, more especially of Charles IX, after whose premature death the poet retired from Paris. Ronsard is celebrated as the chief glory of an association of poets who called themselves the “Pléiade.” His own generation bestowed upon him the title of “Prince of Poets.” Ronsard became deaf at eighteen and so he became a man of letters instead of a diplomatist. His infirmity is probably responsible for a “certain premature agedness, a tranquil, temperate sweetness” which characterizes the school of poetry he founded.