RIP: Laura Hershey (1962-2010)

Another sad, sudden loss: disability rights activist and poet Laura Hershey has died after a very brief illness. The Denver Post obituary has such a lovely photograph of her, and summarizes the facts of her life and work. Laura's facebook page has become (as they do, in such times) a place for posting condolences to the family and memories and tributes. Many other blogs have been posting the news and links to some of Laura Hershey's best-known works, including FWD ("You Get Proud by Practicing"), Media dis&dat, and Victor Pineda. Visit cripcommentary.com for links to many other materials written by or about Laura Hershey. She will be terribly missed.

April 30: Juhan Liiv (1864-1913)

[visual description: portrait of poet Juhan Liiv as a young man, he appears to be fair-haired with light eyes; his expression is serious]

When I was only a little boy
A ringing was ringing in my mind.

And when I grew older
The ringing went louder.

Now I am almost buried in it,
My bosom is ruined under it,

My spirit and life are ringing sounds - Too cramped for them are earthly bounds!

--"Ringing" by Juhan Liiv (1910), as translated here

Estonian poet Juhan Liiv was born in this date in 1864, in the village of Alatskivi. He struggled with mental illness as a young man, and had trouble holding a job. His first story, "The Shadow," was published when he was thirty, and remains a classic of Estonian literature. But by the time it was published, he was staying at a clinic in Tartu, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A literary editor found his work and a volume of almost 500 poems by Liiv was published in 1909. Some of this poetry reflects Liiv's feelings of doom and fear, and his experiences as a poor and misunderstood man; other pages contain romantic or patriotic verses that found an appreciative audience.

Liiv died from pneumonia in winter 1913, after being thrown off a train (he didn't have a ticket, and unfortunately he didn't take his coat when he was ejected in a remote area). Today, Liiv is considered one of the finest poets in Estonian literature. His grave in his home village has a handsome marker, and the farm where he was raised is now a museum. Some of his writings have been set to music. Alatskivi also offers an annual Juhan Liiv Prize for Poetry.

January 5: Thomas Pringle (1789-1834)

[Image description: engraved head-and-shoulders portrait of Thomas Pringle as a young man, balding, with long sideburns and a high-collared white shirt, head resting on one hand.]

Scottish poet, editor, and abolitionist Thomas Pringle was born on this date in 1789, on a farm in Blaiklaw, Roxburghshire. As a baby, his hip became dislocated, and the dislocation went untreated; Pringle used crutches throughout his life thereafter. From his memoirs:

"My early reminiscences reach back to a period when I must have been about three years old, or little more. I remember of being carried to Kelso when about that age, and being tormented by doctors examining my limb, and making me wear a red morocco boot, with steel bandages to keep it in some prescribed position. These appliances were of no advantage, and were, ere long, superseded by a pair of crutches. The latter I soon learned to use with such ease and adroitness that, during my boyhood and youth (when I generally enjoyed robust health), I felt but little incommoded by my lameness."

Pringle's later adventures included a six-year stint as a librarian in South Africa, where he was an early publisher of English-language news and literary publications. His work in publishing and abolition led to his role as the recorder of Mary Prince's narrative, which was published in 1831. Pringle died three years later, from pneumonia, age 49.

January 4: James Nack (1809-1879)

Poet James M. Nack was born 4 January 1809, and wrote a poem for New Year's Day for his daughter Eveline:

A New-Year's Greeting to my Daughter (1859)

So it is gone! -- another year!
A drop of time lost in the sea
Of dark and deep eternity,
In which we all must disappear!
Well, since so transient our career,
The blessings that attend the way
More precious grow with every day:
So is it with my EVELINE,
And ever was since she was mine;
Since first she nestled on my breast,
And on its beatings rocked to rest;
And when her little arms at length
To twine around me gathered strength,
And her young eyes replied to mine
With love's intelligence divine;
When first her lips began to frame
Sweet murmurings of a father's name;
Or with more eloquence of love
Those rosy lips to mine were prest--
Oh, closer still I clasped my dove,
And could have died so very blest!
....

Nack, a lifelong New Yorker, was deaf after a serious head injury when he was nine years old. He was among the first successful alumni of the New York Deaf and Dumb Asylum, which he attended from 1818 to 1823. He worked in the office of the Clerk of the City of New York for many years, and frequently contributed poems to the New York Mirror. He published several volumes of verse, starting with The Legend of the Rocks and Other Pieces (1827). Much of his poetry celebrates his happiness in family life--he married in 1838 and was the father of three daughters (including Eveline, above). Nack also did translations from French, German, and Dutch. Several books of Nack's poetry are available in Full view on Google Books (The Romance of the Ring, Earl Rupert, and The Immortal, for three).

For further reading, see:

Christopher Krentz, ed., A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing 1816-1864 (Gallaudet University Press 2000).

John Lee Clark, ed., Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology (Gallaudet University Press 2009).

Back from the Disability History Conference

Spent last week on a combination family vacation and conference trip, to the Disability History Conference at SFSU. It was a good conference, small, no book display or anything, just two sessions running concurrently, probably 50-100 people? (I'm bad at guessing such numbers.) I was on two panels, one for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts on File 2009), and one for my project about Marion Brown (1843-1915), with Iain Hutchison (more on that here). Iain brought me a wonderful gift: The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press 2007). It has an entry on Marion Brown in it (written by Iain), but it has loads of other great stories, and if you're a longtime reader of DS,TU, you know I'm already scanning it for post subjects. Better than popcorn.

One example, for starters: Christian Gray (1772-c1830) was a farmers' daughter from near Perth, who became blind when she survived smallpox as a little child. She was read to, daily, for her education; in time, she began composing poetry, and her first volume of poems was published in 1808. She pointed to Milton and Ossian as her predecessors, and wrote poems about being blind (I can't find any of those verses online yet, though).

July 13: John Clare (1793-1864)

[Image description: Engraved portrait of the poet John Clare, shown with tousled hair, wearing a suit with a heavy coat, vest, and a shirt loosely tied up with a print kerchief]

English poet John Clare was born on this date in 1793, in Helpston, near Peterborough. He was the son of a laborer, and himself a laborer, a gardener, who wrote poetry when he could, to be published by an acquaintance. His earnings were never enough to adequately support his wife and seven children (and his alcohol consumption); he experienced depression and later erratic behavior. In 1837 he was placed in a private asylum. After four years, he tried to live at home again, but his wife soon committed him again, this time to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he eventually died in 1864. It was at Northampton that he wrote his best known poem, "I Am," reflecting his sense of being abandoned by friends and loved ones, his vivid torments, and his longing for rest, "untroubling and untroubled."

I AM
John Clare

I am; yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

July 4: Christine Lavant (1915-1973)

[Image: Black-and-white photo of a woman, Christine Lavant, wearing a headscarf, gazing at an empty glass of tea on the table she's seated behind]

"Illusions, to be sure, are safe, are precious, but the truth is
usually more important."

--Christine Lavant

Austrian poet Christine Lavant was born on this date, the youngest in a big family based in a Carinthian village. Her father was a miner, her mother a seamstress. Christine was sick a lot as a kid--one infection damaged her vision when she was an infant, another made her deaf in one ear as a teenager; her face and neck bore the scars of experimental x-ray treatments; tuberculosis and depression were also in the mix. At 20, she was hospitalized for six weeks after a suicide attempt; in 1946 she recorded the experience in "Memoirs from a Madhouse," but wouldn't allow its publication until decades after her death. It's now available in an English translation (Ariadne Press 2004).

Lavant became a highly respected poet in Austria, and won the Grand State Prize for Literature in 1970. One of her short stories, "Das Kind" (1948) is about a hospitalized child, bandaged, confused, lonely, dreaming of her family. Her 1956 volume of poems, Der Bettlerschale (The Begging Bowl) reflects her themes of need, abandonment, alienation, and melacholy. A 1978 collection of her poetry appears under the title Art Like Mine Is Only Crippled Life (from a quote by Lavant). There are English translations of a few Lavant poems here and here.

Book Tour: Cripple Poetics by Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus

Homofactus Press has us on their blog book tour schedule (and apparently CripChick and Wheelchair Dancer are also stops on the tour). The book they've sent us information about this time is Cripple Poetics by Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus (photos by Lisa Steichmann), which they describe as "by turns playful, unsettling, raw, and moving...an immersive and sensual correspondence that builds and heats by accretion--one keystroke at a time." Kuppers and Marcus are each, individually, respected performance artists in the field of disability studies. If that sounds like your bag, check it out when it's released this summer--or check out some excerpts here. New to the idea of "crip poetry"? Check out Jim Ferris's "Crip Poetry, or How I Learned to Love the Limp" essay, here.

Petra Kuppers was my roommate at the first Society for Disability Studies conference I ever attended, in 1999, which was also where I first met Mike Dorn. (Petra laughed because I bundle up to sleep, socks and all. You might guess from her work that she's not so much for the bundling.) Whenever you think, wow, it would be so cool if someone could combine this topic and that topic and do something provocative with all the intersections and overlaps and contradictions--well, Petra's one of the people who can do such things, and does them beautifully.

February 26: Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913)

[Image description: an oval framed, black-and-white portrait of a young woman in an embroidered blouse and jacket]

Who told you that I'm weak,
That I succumb to fate?
My voice is strong when I speak,
My thoughts and songs vibrate.

Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka was born Larysa Kosach on this date (more or less--depends on which calendar you follow) in 1871. From age 10, she had chronic joint and bone pain caused by tuberculous arthritis. In search of relief, she traveled a lot to warmer places, seaside towns on the Crimea, in Italy, in Egypt, and elsewhere. Her parents taught their children Ukrainian language and culture, when such things were banned in the Russian-run schools. As a result, she took the pen name "Ukrainka" (Ukrainian woman), and published poetry, drama, essays, and literary criticism, all informed by her study of Ukrainian folktales, history, and culture. Her controversial works had to be published in another part of Ukraine, outside Russian jurisdiction. (She also published translations, including a 1902 translation of the Communist Manifesto, which got her arrested.) The ferocity of her cultural nationalism was often contrasted with her physical "frailty," a false contrast that provoked her to write the lines above.

Today, there are monuments to Ukrainka throughout Kiev--and a boulevard named for her. There's also a monument to her at the University of Saskatchewan, and another in downtown Cleveland. Her image has been featured on Ukrainian postage, coins, and banknotes.

January 3: Anne Stevenson (b. 1933)

Anne Stevenson, poet
an older white woman wearing glasses and short brown hair

I've lost a sense. Why should I care?
Searching myself, I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair
And set it deftly, like a snare.

--Anne Stevenson, "On Going Deaf"

American-raised English poet Anne Stevenson turns 74 today. She was studying music in college, a cellist, when she started becoming deaf, and turned to literature. (Stevenson now uses a cochlear implant.) She's published eighteen volumes of poetry, a biography of Sylvia Plath, and two studies of Elizabeth Bishop's work. Some of Stevenson's poems, "What I Miss" and "Hearing with my Fingers" among them, are about music and deafness; she dispels the common misconception that deaf people only experience silence.  "Silence I miss," she declares. 

Visit Anne Stevenson's website for more information.

See also: 
Angela Leighton, ed. Voyages over Voices:  Critical Essays on Anne Stevenson (Liverpool University Press 2010).

[Image, text, and links updated 3 January 2014]

November 15: Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)

English writer Charlotte Mew was born on this date in 1869, in London. Her sister Freda was institutionalized at age 19, in an asylum on the Isle of Wight, and remained there almost 60 years, until her death in 1958. Their brother Henry also died in a lunatic asylum in 1901, at the age of 35. Charlotte and her other sister Anne believed they might also become mad: "She and her sister had both made up their minds early in life that they would never marry for fear of passing on the mental taint that was in their heredity," wrote a friend. To another friend, Charlotte described her own "queer uncertain mind." Charlotte Mew died by suicide in 1928. This is one of her poems about madness, segregation, and stigma, and the belief that disability was "the incarnate wages of man's sin":

On The Asylum Road

Theirs is the house whose windows---every pane---
Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:
Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,
The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

But still we merry town or village folk
Throw to their scattered stare a kindly grin,
And think no shame to stop and crack a joke
With the incarnate wages of man's sin.

None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet,
The moor-hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet,
The hare-bell bowing on its stem,
Dance not with us; their pulses beat
To fainter music; nor do we to them
Make their life sweet.

The gayest crowd that they will ever pass
Are we to brother-shadows in the lane:
Our windows, too, are clouded glass
To them, yes, every pane!

August 28: Janet Frame (1924-2004)

'For your own good' is a persuasive argument
that will eventually make a man agree
to his own destruction.

--Janet Frame

New Zealand poet, novelist, and memoirist Janet Frame was born 28 August 1924, in Dunedin. She spent much of her twenties in mental hospitals, beginning with a voluntary commitment in 1947, ending with her final release in 1954. (A diagnosis of schizophrenia was made, but was later rejected by a panel of psychiatrists in London.) She underwent hundreds of electric shock treatments --"each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution," she said -- during her hospitalizations. Her mother had signed the paperwork for a lobotomy, but the surgery was canceled after Frame's 1951 book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, won a national award. She wrote a novel based on her family and her hospitalizations, Owls Do Cry, published in 1957. Another novel by Frame, Faces in the Water (1961), features a heroine who is institutionalized and almost lobotomized. Her novel Scented Gardens for the Blind (1980) has as its main character a girl who never speaks.

Some cites on Frame and disability, to mark her birthday (plenty more cites here):

Simone Oettli-van Delden, Surfaces of Strangeness: Janet Frame and the Rhetoric of Madness (Victoria University Press 2003).

Ana Maria Sanchez Mosquera, "Un/writing the Body: Janet Frame's An Angel at my Table," Commonwealth Novel in English 9-10(Spring-Fall 2000-2001): 218-241.

C. MacLellan, "Conformity and Deviance in the Fiction of Janet Frame," Journal of New Zealand Literature 6(1988): 190-201.

Susan Schwartz, "Dancing in the Asylum: The Uncanny Truth of the Madwoman in Janet Frame's Autobiographical Fiction," Ariel 27(4)(October 1996): 113-127.

Tanya Blowers, "Madness, Philosophy, and Literature: A Reading of Janet Frame's Faces in the Water," Journal of New Zealand Literature 14(1996): 74-89.

Venla Oikkonen, "Mad Embodiments: Female Corporeality and Insanity in Janet Frame's Faces in the Water and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar," Helsinki English Studies 3(2004): online here.

July 29: Eunice Tietjens (1884-1944)

Eunice Tietjens, born on this date in 1884 (and pictured at right, in a head-and-shoulders photo), was a Chicago-based poet and associate editor of the influential magazine Poetry. She also traveled widely, in China, Africa, and the South Pacific. For sixteen months during World War I, she went to be a foreign correspondent in France, for the Chicago Daily News. The experience left her horrified; in her horror, she wrote the following poem:

Song for a Blind Man Who Could Not Go to War

You who have no eyes to see
You were spared what shaketh me.

Houses ribbed against the sky
Where the storm of steel went by;

Barbed wire rusting in the rain,
Still unwashed of human pain;

Children's eyes grown black with fear;
Grief too dead for sound or tear;

Earth with clotted death for yield;
Crows above a battlefield;

Brains like paint spilled on a wall,
And flesh that has no form at all;

And after nights when souls have gone
The lovely, heedless, heartless dawn.

You who have no eyes to see
You were spared what shaketh me.

Paris, 1918

Tietjens was surely underestimating the way such horrors might be perceived without visual inputs--but it's still a poem that conveys something of the post-WWI sense of appalled weariness and rethinking assumptions. She's been shaken into different thinking about impairment... and about sunrises, too. (Another poem of interest is her "From a Hospital Bed," which begins with the evocative lines, "This is a house of many-fingered pain/Swift fingers, pitiless, that probe and press:/A sullen house, where torture is and stress,/ And where drugged nightmare dreams grow real again.")

Both quoted poems are from Tietjens' Body and Raiment (Knopf, 1919). (Thanks again, Google Books.)

June 17: Henry Lawson (1867-1922)

Get some sympathy and comfort from the chum who knows you best,
That your sorrows won't run over in the presence of the rest;
There's a chum that you can go to when you feel inclined to whine,
He'll declare your coat is tidy and he'll say: 'Just look at mine!'
Though you may be patched all over he will say it doesn't show,
And he'll swear it can't be noticed when your pants begin to go.

--a stanza from Henry Lawson's "When Your Pants Begin to Go" (1892)

Born 140 years ago today, Australian poet and author Henry Lawson (pictured at right, a smiling man with an abundant mustache, wearing a suit). He began to lose his hearing following an ear infection at age 9; at 14, he was completely deaf, and left school. He worked on the railway and lived with his mother, who ran a small newspaper in Sydney. His first poem and first short story were published in his mother's newspaper. In the early 1890s, he wrote for a Brisbane newspaper, the Boomerang. He traveled Australia, worked as a sheep shearer, and hung around with Banjo Paterson, collecting material for his writing, which was popular in its day and is still prized and studied as a record of Australian bush life in the late 1800s. Lawson married and had two children before 1900, and taught briefly at a Maori school in New Zealand with his wife, Bertha.

Things turned for Lawson after he separated from his wife in 1902. His alcoholism became a problem in keeping a job; he was in jail and hospitals a good bit; he survived a suicide attempt with serious injuries, and was sometimes seen begging in the streets of Sydney. Friends found him a job and took care of him when he could no longer work; he died after a stroke, in 1922, at the age of 55. The huge state funeral that followed was the first one given for an Australian writer.

Biographies of this deaf balladeer and journalist include Colin Roderick's Henry Lawson: A Life (Harper Collins 1999), and Manning Clark, Henry Lawson: The Man and the Legend (Melbourne University Press 1995). Some poems by Lawson are online here, and here (not open-access).

February 9: Laura Redden Searing (1839-1923)

Today is the birthday of American poet and journalist Laura Redden Searing, born on this date in 1839, in Maryland. She became deaf before adolescence, after a bout with meningitis. Laura Redden attended the Missouri School for the Deaf beginning in 1855. After school, she began publishing her poetry under the masculine pen-name "Howard Glyndon." She also worked for the St. Louis Republican, reporting from Washington DC during the Civil War, and from Europe in the later 1860s. She married a lawyer, and had a daughter, Elsa; the marriage didn't work out, and Laura moved to California with Elsa in 1886, when they attended a conference on deaf education and never returned East.

Laura Redden Searing was a proponent of the oral method of deaf education, although she herself never found lipreading a reliable means of following a conversation. Instead, she preferred the pen-and-paper mode, which means that her archived papers (in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Columbia) are unusually rich in records of everyday conversations, written on the back of envelopes and other scrap paper.

Want to read more about Searing? Your best bet is Judy Yaeger Jones and Jane E. Vallier, ed., Sweet Bells Jangled: Laura Redden Searing, A Deaf Poet Restored (Gallaudet University Press 2003, part of their Classics in Deaf Studies Series). Or check out the May 2005 essay and interview from Poetry Magazine about deaf poets.

November 17: Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005)

When I am depressed, I am less than a driven leaf.

Today (or November 27) would have been the seventieth birthday of Israeli poet and translator Dahlia Ravikovitch (also sometimes found as Dalia Rabikovitz), who died last year in Tel Aviv (suicide was presumed, but later dismissed, as the cause). Ravikovitch has been called "the greatest Hebrew woman poet of all time," and her ten books of poetry include verses taught to Israel's schoolchildren and set to music. She also translated poems by Yeats, TS Eliot, and Poe, as well as PL Travers's Mary Poppins. She slept days, and wrote in the night. She wrote only by hand (no typewriter or computer), and kept every draft she ever penned, back to school notebooks from childhood.

Ravikovitch spoke and wrote about her life with depression, including hospitalizations and several suicide attempts. One of the stories in her collection Winnie Mandela's Football Team (1997) is set in a psychiatric hospital; her poem "Pride" ends with the lines

I told you, when rocks crack, it comes as a surprise.
All the more so, people.

September 1: Violet Kennedy-Erskine Jacob (1863-1946)

September 1 was the birthday of Scottish writer Violet Kennedy-Erskine Jacob (pictured at left), who wrote historical novels, children's literature, poetry, a history of her family's estates, and letters from India. She illustrated her diaries with her own watercolors. Her imaginative writings often involve heavy but authentic use of the Scots dialect. Here's an example, about a disabled WWI veteran and the changed dynamics observed in his marriage after his return from war:

KIRSTY'S OPEENION

FINE div I ken what ails yon puddock, Janet,
That aince wad hae her neb set up sae hie;
There's them that disna seem to understaun it,
I'se warrant ye it's plain eneuch to me!

Mibbie ye'll mind her man-a fine wee cratur,
Ower blate to speak (puir thing, he didna daur);
What garred him fecht was jist his douce-like natur;
Gairmans is bad, but Janet's tongue was waur.

But noo he's hame again, ye wadna ken her,
He isna feared to contradick her flet;
He smokes a' day, comes late to get his denner,
(I mind the time she'd sort him weel for that!)

What's garred her turn an tak a road divairgint?
Ye think she's wae because he wants a limb?
Ach! haud yer tongue, ye fuil-the man's a sair-gint,
An there's nae argy-bargyin wi him!

[In sum, a neighbor, Kirsty, says that Janet used to be snobby and domineering to her husband, but since he's come home from war she's sweeter to him, and he smokes and comes in late, without suffering her wrath. Kirsty says it's nothing to do with his missing limb; Janet's husband is just less afraid of her, after his military experience.]

August 11: Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

American poet Louise Bogan was born on 11 August 1897, in a mill town in Maine. She reviewed poetry for the New Yorker for almost thirty years; and she experienced depression throughout her life, times she described as "tearless sorrow." She was (voluntarily) committed for psychiatric hospitalization more than once in the 1930s.

Here's a poem by Bogan (copied from here):

Evening in the Sanitarium

The free evening fades, outside the windows fastened with decorative iron grilles.
The lamps are lighted; the shades drawn; the nurses are watching a little.
It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bone needles;
of the games of anagrams and bridge;
The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask.

The period of the wildest weeping, the fiercest delusion, is over.
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost well.
Some of them will stay almost well always: the blunt-faced woman whose thinking dissolved
Under academic discipline; the manic-depressive girl
Now leveling off; one paranoiac afflicted with jealousy.
Another with persecution. Some alleviation has been possible.

O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after childbirth!
O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted!
To the suburban railway station you will return, return,
To meet forever Jim home on the 5:35.
You will be again as normal and selfish and heartless as anybody else.

There is life left: the piano says it with its octave smile.
The soft carpets pad the thump and splinter of the suicide to be.
Everything will be splendid: the grandmother will not drink habitually.
The fruit salad will bloom on the plate like a bouquet
And the garden produce the blue-ribbon aquilegia.

The cats will be glad; the fathers feel justified; the mothers relieved.
The sons and husbands will no longer need to pay the bills.
Childhoods will be put away, the obscene nightmare abated.

At the ends of the corridors the baths are running.
Mrs. C. again feels the shadow of the obsessive idea.
Miss R. looks at the mantel-piece, which must mean something.

See also:

Nell Casey, ed. Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression (Harper Collins 2001).

June 3: Robert Tannahill (1774-1810)

Scottish poet Robert Tannahill was born on June 3, 1774. He was known to be sensitive most of his life, with a melancholy that would now probably be labeled depression. Here's how David Semple described Tannahill's state of mind in an 1875 edition of his works:

The Poet, it will be observed from our preceding remarks, was sinking under constitutional disease, and the symptoms of aberration of mind were developing. His mental strength had been overworked, and his mind, like a musical chord brought to its fullest tension, was ready to snap. His fine feelings were overcome by unjust criticism, and the sensibility of his nature overwhelmed with captious remarks. Both diseases were rapidly increasing, and his reason hung like the beam trembling in the balance. His relations observed the progress of the physical disease, but they were loth to believe he was suffering from a disorder the most calamitous that can afflict the human race.

The "constitutional disease" mentioned here was tuberculosis, which had already taken the lives of his father, his sister, and three of his brothers. Just before he turned 36, Tannahill slipped from his family's house in the night, and drowned himself in the Paisley Canal. Few of his unpublished poems survive--he burned the manuscripts shortly before his death, after a publisher rejected his work. The Complete Tannahill is an online archive of his verse.