‘Transcendental models of subjectivity offer an attractive way of conceptualizing the more striking effects of the space of composition, not as the workings of an external agency but as the manifestation of hidden “depths” of the mind, depths that might also be accessible perhaps in dreams or through experiments with drugs. This mystification tends to deprive the work of art its status as a cultural product. It is taken to embody a privileged mode of consciousness that overcomes Cartesian dualism. The poem comes to be read in relation to some mysterious faculty of “creativity”, testimony to a union between the mind and some more universal principle of life, a lost human possibility to which writers have access in a heroic katabasis into the psyche – the artist as possessor of a unique power that may hold the key even to the underworld. This Romantic Orphism remains the dominant way in which poets have tried to understand inspiration. Again and again writers have searched for some mysterious technique or hidden faculty of mind with the rhetorical properties traditionally ascribed to inspiration – that of a creative fiat that somehow guarantees its own overwhelming power and value in the eyes of others.’
Timothy Clark, ‘The theory of inspiration’. Manchester, New York, 2000 [1997], p. 29.
© 2014 Leo van der Sterren
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