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In the Spring Issue of Stinging Fly Nick Laird alludes in passing, in the poem Number 8, to an interesting chapter in the history of humanity. The reference is as follows:


Odd that he made eight, Evagrius,
favoured adherent of Basil the Great,
counsellor to Nectarius, Evargrius of Pontus,

the first to itemise the list for us,
of original deadly sins,...

concluding:
can catch and take like all diseases
including sadness number eight.

Laird's shrewd observation draws our google to the fact that the 4th century Greek monastic theologian Evagrius of Pontus, originally drew up a list of eight not seven deadly sins. These were, in order of increasing seriousness: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia (from the Greek "akedia," or "not to care"), vainglory, and pride. In the 6th century, Pope Gregory the Great retained sadness, but reduced the list to seven items, and in the 17th century the canonical list emerged, with sadness being replaced by sloth. If you reinsert sadness though, and view the original list through a secular lens, then we see it as a step by step enumeration of what some would call our current malaise: the increasing fixation with the self. It's a nice, if partially obscure reference, and as such illustrates just why we should ignore the herd that bemoan obscurity in poetry. Obscurity, is nothing other than something forgotten. And something forgotten, sometimes, deserves to be revived. For Laird, this aspect of fixation with the self, may not always be something we can control; it may be as aspect of our nature. As such, he concludes by classifying sadness as a disease.