AustLit

'Francis Webb’s Ward Two is based on Webb’s hospitalisation for schizophrenia in Paramatta in the 1960s, and was the first Australian poetic sequence concerned with the experience of being institutionalised for mental illness. Whilst anti-psychiatrists condemn the harmful influence of psychiatry, and the social model of disability suggests that disability is a social construction, the poetry of Ward Two holds up the nuances of the institution, the society surrounding it and the disabilities suffered by those within. Through a dry, self-deprecating tone characteristic of mid-century Australian poets, and setting himself apart from the Romantics and American confessionals, Webb represents his speaker and other patients as holy, artistic and transcendental. Although the lines are self-consciously ironic, their sonic effects also suggest, in sincere celebration, that the psychiatric subjects have some spiritual quality that others lack. In this liminal space, those condemned by society – the mad, the gay and the mentally disabled – can recover their identities, thoughts and language, even through the process of losing them. While Foucault wrote that psychiatry is a monologue by reason about madness, Webb’s poetry is a monologue about madness by both reason and unreason, as his surrealist lines have the inventive leaps that align it with unreason, but they also have the calm mode of address and high order linguistics to align it with reason. This affords it a unique position through which it can speak about mental illness that sets it apart from the pathologising language of psychiatry, and the romanticising language of anti-psychiatry. I argue that Webb’s poems, synthesising beauty and pain through imagery, rhyme and metaphor, can depict the subtleties of the schizophrenic mind, and the harmful and healing aspects of psychiatry and the institution.' (Publication abstract)