And the Sibyl with raving mouth, uttering words solemn, unadorned, and unsweetened, reaches with her voice a thousand years because of the god in her.
HERACLITUS
Plato's deliverance of the poet from bondage to imitation and technique is couched in terminology which, through the connotations of the word "inspiration," suggests that the poet's frenzy is identical with madness. Indeed, invention is a condition for poetry and for this the poet must be ". . . out of his senses and the mind no longer in him." The historical notion of poetic inspiration is closely associated with Plato's statement. Elaborations of the assertions that poets do not speak by any rules of art and that "God takes away [their] minds, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker,"1. have appeared to be poetic metaphor. It is startling, consequently, to note that so rationalist a philosopher as Aristotle not only offers "a strain of madness" as the alternative explanation of poetry to "a happy gift of nature" (in which case a man is "lifted out of his proper self"),2. but that in Problems, the Stagarite speculates upon the close relation between insanity and genius.3
It is necessary here neither to suggest the close relation of
____________________-153-
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: The Artist as Creator.
Contributors: Milton C. Nahm - Author.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Press.
Place of publication: Baltimore, MD.
Publication year: 1956.
Page number: 153.
This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.
One moment ...
- Georgia
- Arial
- Times New Roman
- Verdana
- Courier/monospaced
Reset