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Depression In William Wordsworth

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I have been seeing three new patients recently, all Romantic poets who appear to be suffering from various levels of melancholy. Although each one of these poets is highly successful and influential in the Romantic Movement, each has experienced bouts of dejection, loneliness, and disillusionment with reality. However, this melancholy seems different from cases I have encountered in the past. Strangely, none of these clients show symptoms of the excessive black bile that typically associated with melancholy such as apathy, lack of motivation, and hopelessness (Brady, Haapala). In fact, while all of these clients experience melancholic thoughts, these emotions appear to be more complex than depression as they allow the pleasures of deep reflection and often lead to feelings of sublime joy and inspiration. Instead of suffering from a clinical form of melancholy or depression, these clients appear to be experiencing a complex emotion of joypain which they believe has “the capacity to reveal the infinite powers of the self or the imagination” (Murray, 722). Yet, while all of these poets seem to believe in the importance of melancholy as inspiration for their work, each of these poets also seems to express this emotion in different ways. While one of these poets, Mr. William Wordsworth, often turns his negative ruminations into positive reflections on nature and memory, Mr. Coleridge instead experiences deeper melancholic moments that he cannot dispel quite so easily. Mr. John

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