Edited by author 07-04-2007 05:06 PM
Those of you who are so feverishly resisting Fitzgerald's diagnosis of Yeats seem to be saying that there's something wrong with being autistic. There isn't. It's just a way of thinking about a set of behaviors. It's not like someone said he was an ax-murderer or something. If someone told you Oscar Wilde was gay, or Hemingway was an alcoholic, or Virginia Woolf was left-handed, I doubt you'd invest all this time and energy protesting. You'd say "how interesting" and turn the page. But as soon as someone hints that a genius might have been autistic, people run for the hills. What's the real problem here--does everybody have to be "normal" to be accepted by you?

I think Fitzgerald's research is brilliant, and it paves the way for future studies of how autistic people and others with disabilities have contributed in marvelous ways to our culture.

I have studied Yeats' biography and poetry for years. It's pretty obvious to me that he was on the spectrum, but that in no way diminishes his poetic genius or vision. I volunteer with students k-12 and also college level who are autistic, and I smiled when I read Fitzgerald's assessment of Yeats because his behaviors did, indeed, reveal his autism. How many poets do you know who walk up and down busy streets flapping their arms like seagulls with their eyes closed, reciting poems? Not too many.

As for AS being "extremely rare." Not so fast. Current estimates for AS are about 1 in 150. So it seems logical that out of the world's one thousand greatest writers, that maybe 10 of them were probably on the spectrum.

Yeats Beats Keats, Pounds Ezra, Lords it Over Tennyson

"The best poet since Shakespeare?" Perhaps... But what shocked me in this piece on the new Yeats bio (for people who didn't get ripped from hefting the Lowell Collected) is Auden's ranking in the rest of the 20th C. I would have thought him a rung or two higher. Was it the Russian judge deducting points for late life Christianity again?



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Edited by author 01-12-2004 07:38 PM
There's always the possibility that this whole Yeats diagnosis is a crass publicity stunt to advance this psychiatrist's public profile and academic standing.

You know what they say in the academy, "Where credibility is lacking, a little fame will do." (Just ask Dr. Laura...)