13. Poets also used their prose to try and understand the absurdity of the glass delusion sweeping Europe
And it wasn’t just authors who were inspired by the glass delusion. Poets also used the affliction as a subject matter. The most famous example of this is that of the Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens. In his work Costly Folly, which came out in 1622, the protagonist has a serious case of glass delusion. Through his prose, Huygens describes the symptoms in detail. He writes of a man who “fears everything that moves in his vicinity… the chair will be the death for him, he trembles at the bed, fearful that one will break his bum, the other smash his head”.
