Poets and Madmen by Laurie Hayes

There is magic in a good writer. A good novelist will suck you into their world for hours at a time, make it impossible to put their
book down, leave you dazed and a bit hungover. An excellent novelist will lay down their world on top of yours, leaving you questioning just what it was darting out of your peripheral vision, making you anxious or confused. Novelists can give you nightmares.

Poets are more dangerous. Poets don’t let you into their world, they infiltrate yours. They don’t alter what you see; they get inside your head and change how you think about what you see, the way you use words to describe and understand the world around you. They alter your ability to communicate. It can take hours for a novelist to construct a world that you tumble into and back out of; in just a few pages a great poet will so infect your mind that you are thinking in their meter, speaking in their words, moving to the rhythm of their syntax.

Check this against the famous. Read a sonnet or two from Shakespeare and notice how sharp the headlights blaze through pouring rain—the pattern of your thinking has been changed. Saul Williams will make everything pulse with deep, vivid indigo music, Emily Dickinson will make your words light and tripping and strangely sinister. Walt Whitman will make you reach out your words to devour the natural world and make it human, turn it into you. It doesn’t take much for a great poet to set their trap and ensnare you.

Even when you put them down you belong to them. You become a shambling shadow of yourself, your mind a twisted parody of what it once was. With words more potent than any powdered root or tropical venom, they have enslaved you. They have taken over your mind, and put dizzily spinning stars in your eyes. They make you believe in God. Time may pass, you may think you have recovered—but each time it takes less to call you back: a collection of poems, a stanza, a line, a solitary word. A hair trigger, and you slip back into your role, an activated sleeper cell of a poetic mind.

There are reasons we link together poets and madmen.