Madness and Genius
There is an age-old consensus that genius and madness are intimately aligned. Aristotle believed that “Those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendenscies towards melancholia.” Centuries later, Seneca stated that “no great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.” Nearly two millennia after Aristotle, the same conclusion was drawn by two leading English dramatists Shakespear wrote, “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/Are of imagination all compact.” And Dryden held, “Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally’d,/And thin Partitions do their Bounds divide.”
With the coming of the Romantic age around 1800, the notion of the mad genius had become virtual dogma. (pp 284)