Coming late to the party. An assortment of gifted poets over the centuries have suffered from the attack of madness. Several wrote good poems subsequent to that attack - Kit Smart, John Clare, to name two. Others wrote forgettable verse thereafter: Hoelderlin wrote, as my supervisor noted, obscure poetry prior to the madhouse, and clear, inane poems after that. C20th American poets - the confessionals - had treatment available beyond confinement, and so are a special case. Who knows whether Blake was sane or not.
Chesterton's paradox is, in short, prima facie balderdash - lots of poets go mad, scientists are less notorious for it. There's nothing wrong with balderdash - well, actually there is. But it's a free country. We just shouldn't base our thinking around it. Maybe Chesterton needs thanking for having raised the issue. But I'm not convinced. As to Chesterton's contrast concerning who cares about the infinite, I'm not sure it warrants attention. Niels Bohr would be a good example of a physicist who in his line of work actually *thought* about the infinite, as most poets I would guess do not. But that list is not a short one; Chesterton is trading in cliche and stereotype, with religion a possible proximate cause. As T.S. Eliot put it: "Mr. Chesterton's brain swarms with ideas; I see no evidence that it thinks."
Cheers,
John
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