You are on page 1of 1

The doctrine was also an important part of the poetic program of the French Rena issance poets collectively

referred to as La Pliade (Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim d u Bellay, etc.); a full theory of divine fury / enthusiasm was elaborated by Pon tus de Tyard in his Solitaire Premier, ou Prose des Muses, et de la fureur potiqu e (Tyard classified four kinds of divine inspiration: (1) poetic fury, gift of t he Muses; (2) knowledge of religious mysteries, through Bacchus; (3) prophecy an d divination through Apollo; (4) inspiration brought on by Venus/Eros.) The divergent theories of inspiration that Swift satirized would continue, side by side, through the 18th and 19th centuries. Edward Young's Conjectures on Orig inal Composition was pivotal in the formulation of Romantic notions of inspirati on. He said that genius is "the god within" the poet who provides the inspiratio n. Thus, Young agreed with psychologists who were locating inspiration within th e personal mind (and significantly away from the realm either of the divine or d emonic) and yet still positing a supernatural quality. Genius was an inexplicabl e, possibly spiritual and possibly external, font of inspiration. In Young's sch eme, the genius was still somewhat external in its origin, but Romantic poets wo uld soon locate its origin wholly within the poet. Romantic writers such as Ralp h Waldo Emerson (The Poet), and Percy Bysshe Shelley saw inspiration in terms si milar to the Greeks: it was a matter of madness and irrationality. Materialist theories of inspiration again diverge between purely internal and pu rely external sources. Karl Marx did not treat the subject directly, but the Mar xist theory of art sees it as the expression of the friction between economic ba se 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 R ealism, the "inspired" painter or poet was also the most class-conscious painter or poet, and "formalism" was explicitly rejected as decadent (e.g. Sergei Eisen stein's late films condemned as "formalist error"). Outside of state-sponsored M arxist 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 cal led a "political unconscious" that might be present in the artwork. However, in each of these cases, inspiration comes from the artist being particularly attune d 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.

You might also like