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| Delmore Schwartz |
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| Michelangelo Buonarroti |
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| Sylvia Plath |
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| Louis MacNeice |
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| John Berryman |
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| Edgar Allan Poe |
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| Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
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| Anne Sexton |
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| Theodore Roethke |
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| William Collins |
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| Hart Crane |
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| Christopher Smart |
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| John Clare |
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| Robert Lowell |
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| Randall Jarrell |
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| Gerard Manley Hopkins |
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William Collins, Samuel Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, John Berryman, Louis MacNeice, and Sylvia Plath all lost a parent before they reached the age of twelve, and all suffered well-attested periods of depression. Coleridge was addicted to opium; Poe was intermittently alcoholic, used laudanum, and may have been dependent on it; MacNeice was an alcoholic, and both Berryman and Plath commited suicide.
To this list of early bereaved and recurrently depressed poets may be added Michelangelo. It is sometimes forgotten that, as well as painting pictures and creating some of the greatest sculptures in the world, Michelangelo wrote some three hundred poems. [...] In addition to those already mentioned, poets who suffered from recurrent episodes of depression include Christopher Smart, John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. Of these poets, Smart, Clare, Sexton, Crane, Roethke, Schwartz, Jarrell and Lowell all received treatment for depression. Smart and Clare were admitted to 'madhouses'; Lowell was frequently admitted to psychiatric hospitals for periods of mania as well as for depression. Crane, Jarrell, and Sexton all committed suicide."
Anthony Storr, in Solitude — A Return to the Self
