Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement/Gilbert, William (1760?-1825?)
GILBERT, WILLIAM (1760?–1825?), poet, was born in Antigua, and was the son of Nathaniel Gilbert, speaker of the house of assembly in that island. Nathaniel Gilbert was a methodist, and in 1760, 'amidst torrents of reproach, he preached the gospel to the slaves and persevered until he had formed a society of nearly 200.' He died before 1778, when his work was continued by a methodist shipwright named Baxter.
William Gilbert was educated for the bar, and came to England about 1784 as counsel for the defendant in a court-martial. According to Cottle, in his reminiscences of Coleridge, he was unsuccessful, and his failure was the cause of the mental derangement which unquestionably befell him. He was placed in an asylum at Bristol in 1787, but was released after a year's confinement, and was lost sight of until 1796, when he reappeared in Bristol, and there published a poem betokening both the power and the disorder of his faculties, 'The Hurricane: a Theosophical and Western Eclogue' (Bristol, 1796, 8vo). He became acquainted with Coleridge and Southey, and respect for their intellectual power exercised a restraining influence upon him, notwithstanding which, says Southey in an unpublished letter to William Sidney Walker [q. v.], 'he was the most insane person I have ever known at large, and his insanity smothered his genius.' But, adds Southey, 'that genius, when it appeared, was of a high order, and he was not more an object of pity than of respect to all who knew him.' In 1798 he mysteriously disappeared. He had been wont to discourse with profound gravity of the 'Gilberti,' an African nation unknown to geographers, but whom he affirmed to exist, and to be nearly related to his own family; and Southey, conjecturing that he had gone in quest of them, caused inquiries to be made of captains in the African trade. Nothing could be ascertained, and Southey, writing to Sidney Walker in 1824, spoke of Gilbert as long dead. In fact, however, he had made his way to Charleston, where he survived until about 1825, restored to reason and in good circumstances from the recovery of some litigated property.
Southey thought so highly of Gilbert's poetical power as to assure Cottle, upon the first publication of Landor's 'Gebir,' that 'the poem is such as Gilbert, if he were only half as mad as he is, could have written.' In fact, Gilbert gives few tokens of insanity as long as he keeps to description. The effort to think confuses him, and hence the notes to his poems are far more bewildering than the text. Wordsworth, however, in his notes to 'The Excursion,' quotes one of them as 'one of the finest passages of modern English prose;' and, thus conspicuously brought forward, it seems to have inspired Keats with the Darien simile in his sonnet on opening Chapman's 'Homer.' Montgomery also appears to have taken the idea of his 'Pelican Island' from Gilbert. According to Southey in the letter above cited, Gilbert also wrote a pamphlet on the courtmartial in which he was concerned, and a poem in praise of Mrs. Siddons.
[Cottle's Reminiscences of Coleridge; Southey's Life of Wesley; Southey's History of the West Indies, 1827, ii. 340, 429; and his manuscript letter to W. Sidney Walker.]