Poetry as Panacea: Mill on the Moral Rewards of Aesthetic Experience

In chapter 5 of his Autobiography, John Stuart Mill recounts a crisis in his mental history. The details of Mill’s depression and eventual rehabilitation due to the salutary powers of lyric poetry are well known. But most scholars who have investigated the status of poetry in Mill’s philosophy have overlooked the fact that the story the Autobiography tells about poetry’s contribution to Mill’s spiritual convalescence and moral education raises several interesting interpretive issues and leaves many notable questions unanswered. I begin with an overview of Mill’s psychological case history as presented in the Autobiography. After that I turn my attention to some exegetical difficulties surrounding Mill’s adulation for poetry and the aesthetic experience. While it is clear that Mill thinks poetry has important moral consequences for the individual, and is crucial in the formation of character and conscience, his views about why poetry is of outstanding significance in this respect are less than transparent and have to be reconstructed on the basis of his more developed literary, ethical, and psychological theories. I take issue with two such reconstructions that appear in the secondary literature and present an alternative to them.