Abstract
This essay does not seek to anatomize the creative process, but looks at the credentials of the very idea of such a process in the field of poetry. It is in three parts, somewhat loosely interrelated. The first part inquires into the legitimacy of inquiring into the “creative process”; the second describes some aspects of my own experience, to see whether any thing in the processes of my creating deserves to be called a creative process; and the third asks why one should try to effect a union between such disparate concepts as those of creation and process.
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Notes
E.g., Paul Valéry, Aesthetics (New York: Pantheon, 1964), p. 130 ff.
E.A. Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Collected Works (New York: Crowell, 1902), vol. 14.
Robert Graves, The Crowning Privilege ( Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959 ), p. 214.
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920); and other essays.
Cf. F.E. Sparshott, “Xanthippe,” in Looking for Philosophy ( Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972 ).
See Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964), as well as the article by Koestler contained in this volume.
Aristotle,Poetics vii, 1450b26–31.
See R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938 ).
See, however, Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933) for an explication of the patterns of thought involved.
Cf. A.A. Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966 ).
Vincent Tomas, “Creativity in Art,” Philosophical Review 67 (1958): 1–15.
Conformably with this recognition, Mikel Dufrenne, who speaks of the artist as responding to the call of the as yet uncreated work, describes it as an indeterminate call. See Mikel Dufrenne, Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience ( Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 ), p. 35.
For example, see John Hospers, “The Concept of Artistic Expression,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1954–55.
Ruth L. Bunzel, The Pueblo Potter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929 ).
Here is an example plucked from the remainder table: “It could be argued... that the painting was a kind of relic, a kind of certificate or guarantee that certain activities had taken place previously which you were not there to witness.” Donald Carroll and Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in Modern Art ( New York: Horizon, 1973 ), p. 132.
Plato, Symposium 206b–212a.
See M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), chap. 8.
The phrase “unconscious incubation” seems to have had its original home in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Longman’s, Green and Co., 1902), with the phenomena of religious conversion.
Monroe C. Beardsley, “On the Creation of Art” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23 (1965): 291–305.
For an early manifestation cf. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, 1759.
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© 1981 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague/Boston/London
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Sparshott, F.E. (1981). Every Horse has a Mouth: A Personal Poetics. In: Dutton, D., Krausz, M. (eds) The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5083-2_3
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