This paper traces the linkages between psychiatry and literature in the professional publications of the first generation of American psychiatrists. The author surveys the issues of the American Journal of Insanity from 1844 to 1870. This work is replete with passages from Shakespeare, Byron, Scott, and many other English poets and prose writers. There were several uses to which these early psychiatrists put this linkage. First, they sought to equate the writing and enjoyment of poetry with “unsoundness of mind.” This meant that poets possessed both a form of insanity as well as a special insight into the nature of mental illness. Poets and writers were therefore quoted as authorities on mental illness, and their characters, such as Hamlet and Lear, were treated as if they were actual case histories. Finally, the artistic and poetic productions of the mentally ill in asylums were deemed a particularly rich source of information about the nature and causes of insanity.