The meticulous melancholia of a poet - William Cowper

THE METICULOUS MELANCHOLIA OF A POET

The pre-Romantic English poet William Cowper (1731-1800) was plagued for most of his life by the ailment known then as melancholia. Beginning at age 21, he suffered several protracted bouts of, as he described them, ''dejection of the spirits'' that were heralded by a ''nervous fever.'' Often incapable of rousing himself to write poetry, he composed his best verse, including The Task, for which he became famous, under ''assignment'' from the woman with whom he lived platonically for 31 years, Mrs. Un win, a clergyman's widow, and from their neighbor, Lady Austen. Yet even during his bleakest spells, he recorded in journals and letters his ever-present feeling of unease and foreboding, his fear ''that a cloud may come over me.''

Cowper's meticulous descriptions of his misery, write German psychiatrists Joachim-Ernst Meyer and Ruth Meyer in a recent issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, provide a rare look at the natural course of what they have diagnosed as a bipolar II disorder, or recurrent major depression. Cowper's Memoir, which is based on a narrative he wrote after being hospitalized for a year and a half in the Collegium Insanorum in St. Albans, outside London, also reveals a good deal about how mentally ill members of the upper class were treated during the eighteenth century.

Cowper's first depressive attack came while he was working as a clerk for a London barrister, but it lasted only a few months. At 33, he had a full-blown attack, and attempted suicide by ''throwing himself into the Thames, poisoning himself with laudanum, stabbing himself in the heart, and, as a last resort, hanging himself,'' the Meyers write. After eighteen months in the Insanorum, he recounts in the Memoir, he experienced ''a vague presage of better things at hand without being able to assign a reason for it.''

In 1770 Cowper's brother died, and he again became depressed fora few months. Three years later he fell prey to a severe melancholic phase that lasted nearly seven years: ''I did not, indeed, lose my senses, but I lost the power to exercise them. I could return a rational answer, even to a difficult question; but a question was necessary, or I never spoke at all. I believed that everybody hated me, and that Mrs. Unwin hated me most of all.'' Another long depression began in 1793 and lasted until two years before Cowper's death.

The Meyers figure that Cowper had three short depressions and three long ones, the lengths of which increased the older he got. However, his second was the worst, and during it he had delusions and auditory hallucinations, including, say the Meyers, ''his conviction that he was eternally damned and his perception of the demanding voice of God.'' He was also an insomniac and underwent classically depressive mood swings, ''rising cheerless and distressed in the morning,'' he related, ''and brightening a little as the day goes on.''

Although Cowper's wealth bought him superior medical care, he didn't get much succor. Toward the end of his life, doctors prescribed ass's milk and laudanum, or tincture of opium. One advised that ''a change of air, scene and circumstances'' would do him good.

Unfortunate as Cowper's condition was, his compulsion to set it down on paper, say the Meyers, is particularly enlightening for psychiatrists, since, because of modern antidepressive treatment and prophylaxis, depression's true course can rarely be observed today.

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