Probably. Hemingway did for sure. A Farewell to Arms is all about it.

Hemingway and others of that generation definitely had either PTSD (Hemingway for sure) or a generational ennui/post-trauma mindset of sorts.

Blake is an easy case for me, IMHO. Simply reading his poetry gives away a lot, IMO. "Joy and woe are woven fine" . And his watercolors show indications he was seeking serious healing.

Milton lost his eyesight at 44, and composed his poems using others to write them down. Blindness in his era was not only a bar to all work, but a social stigma as well. One of the men who wrote down his poetry? Andrew Marvell.

I think we forget that many people in the past grew up as we did ---- no PRE-trauma lives ---- and that complex PTSD may have been much more a common human condition than, say, stability and contentment (those were for the few, the rich, the landed gentry, etc.)

I've seen scholarly arguments that Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost had PTSD.

I don't think we can safely judge these matters on anyone pre-1800 or so, however, b/c cultural standards and requirements were quite different before teh Ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism. Imposing modern psych diagnoses on the dead is... tricky for me. The ideas of what was "normal" and "okay" were way different. People lived in conditions that today we'd find deeply traumatic, b/c we expect differently. If everyone expects the same manure pile, then the manure pile is normal, an accepted standard, and therefore causes no stress. Did that make any sense?

I'm on three hours of rotten sleep here.

Good luck...

Hi Leo,

Thank you for playing along :-)

Your sleep-deprived explication was more than reasonable, and I am able to join you in your caution.

Yet...I cannot help wanting to pick a bit further.

Since ancient/enlightenment/modern poets & playwrights contributed to Freud's understanding of the unconscious, is it fair to subject Milton to psychoanalysis? Yes!

Now I must find a discussion of Milton's tender tending of his curly Eve and the big-gunned Almighty.

Have you come across such a thing?

In brief: Socio-cultural influences were extremely different, and so conflicts we would "see" in their lives would not necessarily even be conflicts to the person being analyzed. By limiting ourselves to any one -ism, we damage a better understanding of the person we're deigning to analyze. (In whatever fashion.)

If you want to encounter Freud on Milton? Look in English lit doctoral theses. It's very hip to pick a piont of view and pick apart a work of literature using that POV. Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstructionist theory...

I like your reading of Milton and Paradise Lost, Leo. Now I'm curious as to what you have to say about Dante's Inferno. It was the basis of the last chapter of my book which was about torture under Uruguay's dictatorship and the book The Inferno based on Dante. Carlos Martinez Moreno wrote about that period when I myself was tortured, which brought me here to DS PTSD.

https://www.amazon.com/El-Infierno-Carlos-Martinez-Moreno/dp/0930523474
From Library Journal
Set in a 1970s Uruguay that evokes Dante's Hades, El Infierno is a collage of stories about people caught up in political turmoil. Martinez Moreno, both the Virgil and Dante of this living Inferno, tells the stories he learned working as a lawyer defending political prisoners: stories of bankers and military advisers, their kidnappers, the desparecidos and their families, army officers, and innocent bystanders. Perhaps his greatest achievement is showing how an idealist fighting for justice, a leftist Tupamaro guerrilla, can only continue his struggle by acting unjustly. A disturbing book because Dante's damned were punished out of divine justice, but Martinez Moreno's Uruguayans suffer from the lack of any justice. Ethan Bumas, Fudan Univ., Shanghai
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

By the way, I knew that leftist Tupamaro guerrilla mentioned here personally. He's in that movie on Netflix, A 12 Year Night. I adopted his name as my username here on DS because he led the way after his 12 years of Dantesque hell in national PTSD recovery for Uruguay, writing a bunch of books about it and speaking about it publicly to reduce the stigma.

Keep in mind that Freud was phylogenetically minded: beyond culture. So unless the central nervous system has changed substantially in 300 years, I think there is good reason to accept that Milton might have had the same unconscious battles we currently experience -- though the outward signs and defenses could be culturally conditioned.

I agree. Psychology and psychiatry are relatively new disciplines, whereas literature has been around for thousands of years, so the life of minds such as Milton's are to be found chronicled in the classics. All the way back to Homer. The Iliad is about the Trojan War, but the Odyssey is about the ordeal of coming home from war, something that really helped me with my PTSD after surviving 6 years of combat.