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Artistic Inspiration refers to an unconscious burst of creativity
in an literary, musical, or other artistic endeavour. Literally,
the word means "breathed upon," and it has its origins
in both Hellenism
and Hebraism.
Homer
and Hesiod
believed that inspiration derived from Gods such as the oracle
of Delphi. Similarly, in the Ancient Norse religions,
inspiration derives from the Gods. Inspiration is also a divine
matter in Hebrew
poetics. In the Book
of Amos the prophet speaks of being overwhelmed by God's
voice and compelled to speak. In Christianity,
inspiration is a gift of the Holy
Spirit.
In the 18th century John
Locke proposed a model of the human mind in which ideas
associate or resonate with one another in the mind. In the 19th
century, Romantic poets such as Coleridge
and Shelley
believed that inspiration came to a poet because the poet was
attuned to the (divine or mystical) "winds" and because
the soul of the poet was able to receive such visions. In the
early 20th century, Sigmund
Freud located inspiration in the inner psyche of the artist. Carl
Gustav Jung's theory of inspiration suggests that an artist is
one who was attuned to racial
memory, which encoded the archetypes
of the human mind.
The Marxist
theory of art sees it as the expression of the friction between
economic base and economic superstructural positions, or as an
unaware dialog of competing ideologies, or as an exploitation of a
"fissure" in the ruling class's ideology. In modern psychology
inspiration is not frequently studied, but it is generally seen as
an entirely internal process. In each view inspiration is, by its
nature, viewed as beyond the control of a person.
In Greek thought, inspiration meant that the poet or artist
would go into ecstasy
or furor poeticus, the divine frenzy or poetic madness. He
or she would be transported beyond his own mind and given the
gods' or goddesses own thoughts to embody. Plato,
in Symposium
197a, Phaedrus
244, as well as Theocritus,
Pindar,
and Aristotle
(in Poetics) argue that the poet breaks through to the
world of divine truth or divine apprehension temporarily and is
compelled by that vision to create. Therefore, the invocations of
the muses
and the various poetic gods (Apollo and Dionysus,
in particular) are earnest prayers for inspiration, for the breath
of the god. The only substantially different model for inspiration
offered in the Classical world is in the Problemata (of
unknown authorship, but from the peripatetic
school), which suggests that imbalances in the four humours
are the origin of inspiration. Otherwise, Virgil,
Ovid,
and especially Cicero
insist, like the Greek theorists before them, that artistic
inspiration is a bestowed gift of the gods. Cicero, in fact, was
apparently dissatisfied with the figurativeness
"inspiration" had taken and used the term afflatus
instead.
Inspiration is prior to consciousness and outside of skill (ingenium
in Latin). Technique and performance are independent of
inspiration, and therefore it is possible for the non-poet to be
inspired and for a poet or painter's skill to be insufficient to
the inspiration. In Hebrew
poetics, inspiration is similarly a divine matter. In the Book
of Amos, 3:8 the prophet speaks of being overwhelmed by
God's voice and compelled to speak. However, inspiration is also a
matter of revelation
for the prophets, and the two concepts are intermixed to some
degree. Revelation is a conscious process, where the writer or
painter is aware and interactive with the vision, while
inspiration is involuntary and received without any complete
understanding.
In Christianity,
inspiration is a gift of the Holy
Spirit. Saint
Paul said that all of the Bible
is inspired by God (2
Timothy) and the account of Pentecost
records the Holy Spirit descending with the sound of a mighty
wind. This understanding of "inspiration" is vital for
those who maintain Biblical literalism,
for the authors of the scriptures would, if possessed by the voice
of God, not "filter" or interpose their personal visions
onto the text. For those who understand "inspiration" to
be less ecstatic (less Platonic),
the human author's personality and views would mediate the holy
word. For church fathers like Saint
Jerome, David
was the perfect poet, for he best negotiated between the divine
impulse and the human consciousness.
In northern societies, such as Old
Norse, inspiration was likewise associated with a gift of the
gods. As with the Greek, Latin, and Romance literatures, Norse
bards were inspired by a magical and divine state and then shaped
the words with their conscious minds. Their training was an
attempt to learn to shape forces beyond the human. In the Venerable
Bede's account of Caedmon,
the Christian and later Germanic traditions combine. Caedmon was a
herder with no training or skill at verse. One night, he had a
dream where Jesus
asked him to sing. He then composed Caedmon's
Hymn, and from then on was a great poet. Inspiration in
the story is the product of grace:
it is unsought (though desired), uncontrolled, and irresistible,
and the poet's performance involves his whole mind and body, but
it is fundamentally a gift.
In the 18th century in England,
nascent psychology
competed with a renascent celebration of the mystical nature of
inspiration. John
Locke's model of the human mind suggested that ideas associate
with one another and that a string in the mind can be struck by a
resonant idea. Therefore, inspiration was a somewhat random but
wholly natural association of ideas and sudden unison of thought.
Additionally, Lockean psychology suggested that a natural sense or
quality of mind allowed persons to see unity in perceptions and to
discern differences in groups. This "fancy" and
"wit," as they were later called, were both natural and
developed faculties that could account for greater or lesser
insight and inspiration in poets and painters.
The musical model was satirized, along with the
afflatus,
and "fancy" models of inspiration, by Jonathan
Swift in A
Tale of a Tub. Swift's narrator suggests that madness is
contagious because it is a ringing note that strikes
"chords" in the minds of followers and that the
difference between an inmate of Bedlam
and an emperor was what pitch the insane idea was. At the same
time, he satirized "inspired" radical Protestant
ministers who preached through "direct inspiration." In
his prefatory materials, he describes the ideal dissenter's pulpit
as a barrel with a tube running from the minister's posterior to a
set of bellows at the bottom, whereby the minister could be
inflated to such an extent that he could shout out his inspiration
to the congregation. Furthermore, Swift saw fancy as an
antirational, mad quality, where, "once a man's fancy gets
astride his reason, common sense is kick't out of doors."
The divergent theories of inspiration that Swift satirized
would continue, side by side, through the 18th and 19th centuries.
Edward
Young's Conjectures on Original Composition was pivotal
in the formulation of Romantic
notions of inspiration. He said that genius
is "the god within" the poet who provides the
inspiration. Thus, Young agreed with psychologists who were
locating inspiration within the personal mind (and significantly
away from the realm either of the divine or demonic) and yet still
positing a supernatural quality. Genius was an inexplicable,
possibly spiritual and possibly external, font of inspiration. In
Young's scheme, the genius was still somewhat external in its
origin, but Romantic poets would soon locate its origin wholly
within the poet. Romantic writers such as Ralph
Waldo Emerson (The Poet), and Percy
Bysshe Shelley saw inspiration in terms similar to the Greeks:
it was a matter of madness and irrationality.
Inspiration came because the poet tuned himself to the (divine
or mystical) "winds" and because he was made in such a
way as to receive such visions. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge's accounts of inspiration were the most
dramatic, and his Aeolian
harp was only the best of the many poems Romantics would
write comparing poetry to a passive reception and natural
channelling of the divine winds. The story he told about the
composition of Kubla
Khan has the poet reduced to the level of scribe. William
Butler Yeats would later experiment and value automatic
writing. Inspiration was evidence of genius, and genius was a
thing that the poet could take pride in, even though he could not
claim to have created it himself.
Sigmund
Freud and other later psychologists located inspiration in the
inner psyche of the artist. The artist's inspiration came out of
unresolved psychological conflict or childhood trauma. Further,
inspiration could come directly from the subconscious.
Like the Romantic genius theory and the revived notion of
"poetic phrenzy," Freud saw artists as fundamentally
special, and fundamentally wounded. Because Freud situated
inspiration in the subconscious mind, Surrealist
artists sought out this form of inspiration by turning to dream
diaries and automatic writing, the use of Ouija
boards and found poetry to try to tap into what they saw as
the true source of art. Carl
Gustav Jung's theory of inspiration reiterated the other side
of the Romantic notion of inspiration indirectly by suggesting
that an artist is one who was attuned to something impersonal,
something outside of the individual experience: racial
memory.
Jung's artist is the one best able to feel and express the
conflict between the "shadow" primitive and the
civilized ego and to encode the archetypes
of the human mind. Thus, again, inspiration came from a kind of
genius, as these memories were present in all persons (thereby
accounting for recognition of the archetypes and memories when
viewing artwork), but only the artistic genius could get
inspiration/memory. Those artists who followed Jung's thought put
an emphasis on primitivism
and the study of pre-literate art and myth.
Materialist
theories of inspiration again diverge between purely internal and
purely external sources. Karl
Marx did not treat the subject directly, but the Marxist
theory of art sees it as the expression of the friction between
economic base and economic superstructural positions, or as an
unaware dialog of competing ideologies, or as an exploitation of a
"fissure" in the ruling class's ideology. Therefore,
where there have been fully Marxist schools of art, such as Soviet
Realism, the "inspired" painter or poet was also the
most class-conscious painter or poet, and "formalism"
was explicitly rejected as decadent (e.g. Sergei
Eisenstein's late films condemned as "formalist
error"). Outside of state-sponsored Marxist schools, Marxism
has retained its emphasis on the class
consciousness of the inspired painter or poet, but it has made
room for what Frederic
Jameson called a "political unconscious" that
might be present in the artwork. However, in each of these cases,
inspiration comes from the artist being particularly attuned to
receive the signals from an external crisis.
In modern psychology, inspiration is not frequently studied,
but it is generally seen as an entirely internal process. In each
view, however, whether empiricist or mystical, inspiration is, by
its nature, beyond control.
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