How We Go Within:
The Creative Process in Writers
An essay
by
Jane Piirto
This is an excerpt from a chapter from my book called
My Teeming Brain: Understanding Creative Writers
2002, Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ
“For the artist—every kind of artist, and, I feel sure, not only the artist but everyone engaged in any kind of creative activity—is as enamored of the process of making as of the thing made.”
—Denise Levertov
“One returns from the inspired state as one returns from a foreign country. The poem is the legend of the journey.”
—García Lorca
The mystery of the creative process in writers is of immense fascination to interviewers, and almost every Paris Review interview, for example, asks how the writers get into the mood for writing, where they write, when they write. It is as if what ultimately happens—a writer sitting alone scrawling words on a page, typing words on a page, tapping words that appear on a screen through an electronic miracle—is infinitely interesting.
Psychological Theories of the Creative Process
The most popular theory of the creative process is that there are four steps. This is the theory propounded by Wallas in 1926. He said that there are four stages in the creative process: (1) Preparation; (2) Incubation; (3) Illumination; and (4) Verification. [1] As an example, poet, novelist, and screenwriter Jim Harrison described his creative process in writing poetry, and it seems remarkably like that described by Wallas. Harrison said that “A poem seems to condense the normal evolutionary process infinitely.” The poem arises from some agitation or distress. Then there is “an unconscious moving into the darkness of the problem.” This is balanced by the metaphor: “as if you tipped a buoy over by force then let it snap upwards.” Followed by a “sense of relief,” the poet then casts and recasts the poem into some final or nearly final form. “The last stage ‘calcifies’ or kills the problem.” The poet then may repeat the process. “There must be the understanding of time lapse though”—the image surfacing “may take months, the space between the first sketch and final form an even longer period of time.”[2]
Selection
Psychologists, especially cognitive psychologists, wonder and theorize about what happens in the brain while a writer is thinking. The cognitive psychologist and philosopher David Perkins observed working poets and artists, interrupting them while they were painting or writing and asking them what they were thinking.[3] Ultimately, according to Perkins, the creative process is a process of selection.
Associative Imagination
Interest in the creative process in writers has been around for awhile. One fascinating explanation for the simultaneous interiorness and explosiveness of the writer’s creative process was postulated back in 1920 by Frederick Clarke Prescott. He thought that the very mind of the poet or creative writer was different than the minds of ordinary people. The thought that happens in the writer’s mind is primarily associative and thus is involuntary and effortless, and can hardly be expressed in concrete words but only in images. These images arise in the imagination.[4]
Janusian Opposites
One psychoanalyst who became fascinated by the creative process in his patients was Albert Rothenberg. In over 2,000 hours of interviews , including some with award-winning writers, he formulated a theory of the creative process in writers which he called the janusian process, after the Roman god Janus, the two-faced god.[5] Creators are able to hold opposites in their minds while creating, and to see the possibilities of working with these opposites. Irony, metaphor, ambiguity, and creative tension are hallmarks of the janusian process. These are organic and are seen by the writer as crucial to the meaning of the work. [6]
The janusian process is used in the beginning, during the generation of ideas, and later, a process of synaesthesia is used, where metaphors are created by superimposing unlike elements upon the same space. Thus the writer combines what is seen in the mind’s eye, the mind’s ear, the mind’s touch. Sounds have color and sights have sound. Tastes have texture and movement. Creators consciously develop this metaphorization process, but it also rises spontaneously.
Oceanic Consciousness
Brewster Ghiselin, a poet, edited an anthology of essays on the creative process.[7] Often there is a feeling of oceanic consciousness, which precedes the almost automatic producing of the work. Emotion is often present, and being expressed as the creator exercises intense concentration. An intense or vague pseudo religious experience, the surrender of the self to some internal necessity, a yearning or a hunch, the feeling is usually preverbal, vague, an “intimation of approaching or potential resolution.”
The work then is done with some automaticity. The creator has acquired the necessary tools. Ghiselin pointed out that the part of the creative process most often underplayed is the enormous preparation that creators have to do within their fields. The viewer sees the finished work and forgets the “sweat and litter of the workroom.”
The unconscious work in any field of creativity is done organically, and is not “canny calculation governed by wish, will, and expediency.” The creative mind needs to be managed in order to discover what needs to be done next, and to assure that movement towards the end product is economical and certain. Much of the work is imitation, especially in young creators.
Trancelike State
Ghiselin described the massive concentration that the creator exhibits. One could say that the person is in kind of a trance, concentrating so much that he seems to be hypnotized, or sleepwalking. But this state differs from hypnotism or trance, for the person is collected, autonomous, and watchful. Ghiselin said that this trancelike state is common to all creative activity, but it is an indirect result and comes from the creator’s passion for the particular domain, and not as a direct intention: “In short, the creative discipline when successful may generate a trancelike state, but one does not throw oneself into a trance in order to create.”
In an interview for the Paris Review “Writers At Work” series, John Hersey described his creative dreamlike state: “When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don’t know how to draw the line between the conscious management of what you’re doing and this state.” Hersey said that this dreamlike mood happens during the first stages, the drafts of his work, and he thought it was similar to daydreaming. He said, “When I feel really engaged with a passage, I become so lost in it that I’m unaware of my real surroundings, totally involved in the pictures and sounds that that passage evokes.” He went on to say that this mysterious feeling may be one of the things that attract those of us who write.”
Flow
This reverie state has recently come to be called “flow,” a term fortuitously coined by psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi.[8] Flow happens when a person is engaged in an activity that is challenging and rewarding at the same time. The person enjoys the activity and seeks to repeat it. This activity produces a positive feeling. While doing the activity, the person experiences deep concentration, a sense of being removed from present worries and cares, a sense of control over the activity, and an altered sense of time. In fact, time flies by. This state is most often experienced in solitude or in working with a group with whom one has little conflict, or creative conflict together.
Csikszentmihalyi published the results of interviews with 91 eminent creators in the sciences, business, government, and the arts. The researchers noted nine elements that made up “flow”: (1) There are clear goals every step of the way; (2) There is immediate feedback to one’s actions; (3) There is a balance between challenges and skills; (4) Actions and awareness are merged; (5) Distractions are excluded from consciousness; (6) There is no worry of failure; (7) Self-consciousness disappears; (8) The sense of time becomes distorted; (9) The activity becomes an end in itself, or autotelic.
What Writers Have Said About The Creative Process
While much theorizing has been done by psychologists, what have writers themselves said about their creative processes? There are certain common aspects to the creative process in writers. (a) Rituals abound. The rituals are unique to the person; that is, each writer has his or her own rituals, but many writers seem to like to walk; (b) quiet and solitude seem necessary. (c) inspiration comes through various avenues such as travel, the visitation of the muse, or active imagination, meditation, the use of substances, viewing or hearing others’ art, improvisation, through visions and dreams, through friendships and salons, among other means.
The Ritual of Walking
Some writers like to walk: Samuel Johnson liked to “compose, walking in the park.”[9] Coleridge said he liked to think about writing while walking on uneven ground, climbing over rocks or breaking through the woods. Wordsworth liked to walk back and forth on a straight gravel sidewalk. Tennyson walked with his son, saying his latest poem out loud in rhythm, adding new lines as they seemed necessary. Dickens walked around and around his house during the day, “smiting my forehead dejectedly.” He also took long walks at night. A.E. Housman, C.K. Chesterton, J. M. Barrie, Stephen Potter, and the Brontë sisters also paced and walked around and around a table as they planned their novels. Upton Sinclair said he wore a path 6 inches deep in the woods near where he composed one of his novels one summer. Jack Hodges, who collected these anecdotes, called it “ritualistic pacing.” Others run (Gary Gildner), wrestle (John Irving), or engage in other physical activities that let them reach a state of creative fecundity.
The Necessity for Silence
Some writers are extremely susceptible to noise and distraction, and seek to isolate themselves in a quiet place.[10] To insulate themselves and to work, Carlyle built a sound-proof room, as did T.E. Lawrence. Somerset Maugham had the view to the Cote d’Azur in Paris bricked up so that he could concentrate; J.B. Priestley wrote with his back to a splendid view of the countryside; the children’s author Roald Dahl closed the drapes and wrote in a small, dark room, which he called “a kind of womb.”[11]
Family members had to pass by on tiptoe if their fathers were Dickens or Evelyn Waugh. In order to concentrate, in order to hear the inner voice, many writers must retire from sound. Absolute order was so necessary for Arnold Bennett, that he inspected his study before settling down to write, to see whether the housekeeper had moved any of his objects even a fraction of an inch while dusting, and if his wife couldn’t keep the dogs quiet, she would hear about it.
The appeal of writers’ retreats and colonies is that of peace and quiet away from the melee, so that the creative spirit can descend. At Yaddo, lunch is delivered in a basket to the writers hard at work in their cottages. Advertisements for such retreats promise remoteness, stillness, and solitude. The writer Annie Dillard wrote in Holy the Firm of going to a cabin in the woods and of isolating herself on an island in the Puget Sound.[12] Some writers like to write outdoors, some in. The formation of writer’s “retreats” by enterprising or sympathetic entrepreneurs is a promise of quiet and freedom from distraction for writers tipping their heads sideways in order to hear the hushed footsteps of the muse.
The Necessity for Solitude
For many writers, the core of the creative process is solitude. Poet and novelist Jim Harrison wrote that he requires a few months of near solitude every year: “I have learned . . . that I must spend several months a year, mostly alone, in the woods and the desert in order to cope with contemporary life, to function in the place in culture I have chosen.” He walks and loses his “lesser self” in the “intricacies of the natural world.” In nature, he is able to imagine himself back to 1945, and “the coyotes, loons, bear, deer, bobcats, crows, ravens, heron and other birds that helped heal me then, are still with me now.”[13]
A main frustration is not being able to achieve solitude. Virginia Woolf in her 1954 Writer’s Diary wrote that they had so many visitors and places to go that her head throbbed: “And every time I get into my current of thought I am jerked out of it. . . here I am, not writing—that does not matter; but not thinking, feeling, or seeing—and seizing an afternoon alone is a treasure.”[14]
In Journal Of A Solitude, May Sarton chronicled one year of her life, and here is, briefly, what she had to say about solitude and the creative person. “The value of solitude—one of its values—is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.”[15] During this year Sarton was not a hermit; she was doing public readings and speeches; she was seeing her friends. But her real work was what she encountered in her solitude. Virginia Woolf called solitude “real life” and went on to say, “I find it almost incredibly soothing—a fortnight alone.”
Being a first or only child helps the solitariness required of writers, as Reynolds Price noted. He began to cherish solitude at the ripe old age of four: “By the time I began to store long memories, I was feeling a strong need for solitude.” As an only child, “ it was easy enough to go to my room, the depths of the yard or the woods and think whatever I needed.” Price was by nature a child who needed to be often alone, “ and I freely indulged it.”[16] Poet Amy Clampitt said, “I think the happiest times in my childhood were spent in solitude—reading such stories. Socially, I was a misfit. I didn’t know the right things to say to anybody.”[17] Whether this feeling of not fitting in is more true for writers than for the general population is not known.
William Butler Yeats in his Autobiography commented on the joy of solitude: “As I look backward, I seem to discover that my passions, my loves, and my despairs, instead of being my enemies, a disturbance and an attack, became so beautiful that I had to be constantly alone to give them my whole attentions.” Yeats felt that his solitude was his real life. “I notice that now, for the first time, what I saw when alone is more vivid in my memory than what I saw in company.”[18]
The need for solitude is not universal. Other writers don’t seem to mind external confusion. Nobel prize-winner William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies while he was a teacher, as his students did their desk work or while they had choir practice. George Bernard Shaw and Trollope wrote on railroad trains, as did Robert Olen Butler. Poet Frank O’Hara published a book of poems he wrote while on strolls during his lunch hour from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He was also known for writing spontaneous poems in bars and at gatherings.[19] The poet Hal Sirowitz said, “I tend to write around people. When I sit in my room, alone, it’s hard for the poem to come. What I do, I walk around people, I take the subway, the train, and then when I’m around people and all of a sudden I can hear my mother.“[20]
Inspiration from Travel
Where do writers get their inspiration once they enter the creative process? Travel seems to facilitate the creative process of writers, perhaps because the novelty of sensory experience is inspirational, and a sense of naiveté is easy to maintain. The railway journeys of Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin enhance our travel literature. One can imagine them energized by novelty as the windows opened to new sight after new sight; there they were scribbling in their notebooks and filing impressions in their brains as the scenery changed. Theroux has been traveling to exotic places for almost 30 years and he still finds travel exciting and inspirational.[21]
Travel writer Jonah Blank, in his Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God, confessed that he uses travel to get away from difficult situations in his life. He said he seeks hermitage, or solitude, through travel, by “running off to foreign countries” where he is unknown. “Whether prompted by a dull job, a romance gone sour, or a general feeling of all-encompassing malaise, each trek has been a welcome escape. And each time I travel I see enough fascinating things to reignite my appreciation for the beauty of life.”[22] The sense of naiveté incited by travel is a powerful source of creativity.
The Inspiration of Imagination
How does one imagine a whole novel? What is imagination? Fiction writer Robert Flanagan said that truth is found in the imagination and not in the recounting of fact: “If at times I find truth, I more often lose sight of fact. I confuse what actually happened with what I’ve imagined or feared.” He compared himself to “a scavenger at a community dump.” He notices people’s lives and picks up shards that he puts into his writing. He then imagines emotionally what it was like to live the situation in that person’s life. He empathizes so much that it feels like his own personal experience. Flanagan said, “Often I’ll catch myself feeling depressed or excited, or generally guilty, about something that upon reflection I realize exists only in my fiction.”[23]
For Robert Olen Butler, imagination is fed through a process of associations, almost like a chain. Butler didn’t feel that he could write short stories, but when he was asked to submit a short story for Alan Cheuse’s program on public radio, he said he would try. He looked at his old manuscripts and found them terrible. He was then working on his 11th novel (five unpublished and six published) and there was a thread in the novel that would probably end up being cut out. He took this thread, about Vietnamese boys “who love to catch, train, and fight crickets,” and wrote a short story. “Within 24 hours of writing that story, I had two dozen more story ideas. All these Vietnamese characters’ voices began to present themselves to me. In the next year . . . I wrote one story after another. ”[24] This illustrates that often the very act of writing, the physical act of it, is important and vital to fueling the imagination in the creative process in writers.
Poet Tess Gallagher described the imagination as being magical and dark. She said, “Events of the imagination precede and sometimes outdo the events of life. We’re all islands—inaccessible, drifting apart, thirsting to be explored, magical. . . The landscape of the imagination is the darkest of all.”[25] Novelist John Gardner connected the imagination with dreaming: “Out of the artist’s imagination, as out of nature’s inexhaustible well, pours one thing after another. The artist composes, writes, or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to his net. This, not the world seen directly, is his raw material.” [26]
Poet Denise Levertov also connected imagination and dreams: “Imagination, that breathing of life into the dust, is present in us all embryonically—manifests itself in the life of dream—and in that manifestation shows us the possibility: to permeate, to quicken, all of our life and the works we make.”[27] Levertov described how in a dream she went to the mirror and saw the dream character, a woman with hair wet with a spidery net of diamond-like water drops from misty fields, and said that the very detail of the woman in the mirror was evidence for the “total imagination,” which is different from the intellect. She called it the “creative unconscious.”
Meditation
The numbers of writers who embrace Buddhism or aspects of Buddhism is nothing short of astonishing. Writers with backgrounds in Christianity and Judaism seem to reject the dogma and lack of mysticism they find in their home grown religions, and begin to study eastern faiths. Here is a partial list of poets who have embraced aspects of Buddhism: Allen Ginsberg, Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin, Anselm Hollo, Anne Waldman, Gary Snyder, Jane Augustine, Steve Benson, Stephen Berg, Bob Boldman, Olga Broumas, John Cage, Alan Davies, Diane di Prima, Patricia Donegan, Norman Fischer, Nelson Foster, Dan Gerber, Margaret Gibson, Susan Griffin, Sam Hammill, Jim Harrison, Michael Heller, William Heyen, Jane Hirschfield, Mary Kean, Robert Kelly, David McKain, Jackson MacLow, S.J. Marks, Barbara Meier, Dale Pendell, Anthony Piccione, George Quasha, Jed Rasula, Larry Smith, Lucien Stryk, John Tarrant, and Philip Whalen.[28] Others have embraced the contemplative life of the Christian monastery, for example, the poets Kathleen Norris and Daniel Berrigan. In an interview, poet Sarah Wood spoke about what attracts her to Buddhism. “Creativity seems to get activated by meditation . . . On sesshins (meditation retreats) poems sometimes come flooding up.” Wood believed that “There is a dynamic source that meditation brings us closer to, and that energy surges up through us.” She theorized that “it may be not that poets went to Eastern religions, but that religions like Buddhism with meditation and other such practices, created the poets. First they were Buddhists and then they were poets.” Wood had lost inspiration but then Buddhist meditation helped her. “For me, my poetry had died out except for a ragged scrap of a poem every year or two when I was really upset or dreamy. But with the Buddhism, my poetry came back.” [29]
The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, taught Tibetan Buddhism to many poets and others. The practice of Buddhist meditation was criticized by certain legislators who found out that the Naropa Institute had received grants from the National Endowment from the Arts.[30] All the brouhaha does not demean the fact that writers often use meditation in their creative process.
Divine Madness: Visitation of the Muse
Such divine madness (as opposed to psychiatric madness) comes from four sources, according to Plato in Phaedrus. “The divine madness was subdivided into four kinds, prophetic, initiatory, poetic, erotic, having four gods presiding over them; the first was the inspiration of Apollo, the second that of Dionysus, the third that of the Muses, the fourth that of Aphrodite and “The divine madness was subdivided into four kinds, prophetic, initiatory, poetic, erotic, having four gods presiding over them; the first was the inspiration of Apollo, the second that of Dionysus, the third that of the Muses, the fourth that of Aphrodite and Eros.” Eros.” The Greeks created nine Muses: They were the daughters of Memory (Mnemosyne) and of Jupiter. Each had her own province in music, literature, art, and science. Mostly these seem to be combined when writers speak of being inspired.
The muses came to symbolize the feminine principle. The male principle was symbolized by the Seven Spheres. Thus, “The Music of the Spheres” symbolized the union of the male and female principles, the male being the animus, and the female being the anima. The male creator unites with his anima, or female side, and the female creator unites with her animus, her male side, according to Jungian thought. Dante had his Beatrice, Lancelot his Guinevere, Tristan his Isolde, Ilmarainen his Maid Of North Farm. Dante had as his guide through hell, Virgil, who could be called a general muse, or a desired mentor. At the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, the blind poet invokes the muses in order to help him tell his story.
Historically, the muses were inspirations to creative men. Do creative women have muses? “Yes,” said Carolyn Kizer in an essay called, appropriately, “A Muse.”[31] This muse was her mother, but women’s muses are not always their mothers. Poet Molly Peacock said her muse was her own inner child. The poet Ai had as her muse at one time, the actor Willem DaFoe.[32] She saw him in a movie and was attracted to him. They began to correspond. The exhibit called “Hand of the Poet” contained a letter from him to her, and a picture she had cut out of a magazine. She said of him, “He is my muse, and you know it’s OK. He’s agreed. That he’s my muse, basically.” Ai said that DaFoe “does inspire me . . . —I’ve been inspired by . . . people before but this is like two years. This is a long one.”
The quintessential homage to and historical explanation of the power of the muse is Robert Graves’ tome, The White Goddess.[33] The thesis of the book was that poetic mythical language of Europe “was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse.” According to biographer Miranda Seymour, Graves himself was often inspired by certain young women during his long career as a writer, and he often asked his wife to live in a kind of menage á trois relationship with the current muse. [34]
Muse inspiration comes in response to a feeling for someone, quite possibly a sexual feeling, certainly an emotional identification. Everyone has written a secret love poem to a love, requited or unrequited. The longing lyrics of the Brownings show that the place of erotic desire and longing for sexual union cannot be underestimated in considering the products of any artists. Poets write love poems. Choreographers make ballets. Visual artists paint nudes. Many of these works are efforts to express eroticism within the boundaries of the medium within which the artists are working.
May Sarton said she could only write poetry when she was inspired by a muse, “a woman who focuses the world for me.” Sometimes the woman was her lover. “In one case it was a person I saw only once, at lunch in a room with a lot of other people, and I wrote a whole book of poems.” Sarton called the whole inspiration by the muse mysterious: “Something happens which touches the source of poetry and ignites it.” The muses seem to have in common that they have some aspect of the “Distant Admired Person.” and that person becomes the audience for the poetry, “but usually ‘the loved one’ isn’t really interested in the poems.”[35] Poets Joan Baranow and David Watts met at the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference, fell in love, and wrote a series called “Epithalamium” to each other. Joan’s part of it won her an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council.
Poet James Tipton’s muse, novelist and memoirist Isabel Allende, wrote an introduction to two of his collections of poems. “One day, during the summer of 1994, I received a letter from a stranger,” who wrote to her after reading her work, from the top of the Andes near Machu Picchu. He wrote again a few weeks later, with a story about a woman. Allende said: “I was hooked, not only by the fascinating mystery of that woman, but mainly by the man who had the intuition to send me that precious gift.” She replied, and a correspondence began.
Tipton would send her several poems a week. Allende’s daughter had just died, and “I found myself waiting for the mail with a secret anxiety that I did not want to admit even in the silence of my heart.” She began to be very interested in the man and his poems: the poems “would go deep down inside my sorrow and swim like small fish.” The poems would bring her “to their soft light . . . like shadows, like sounds I heard in sleep, like ships that slip unnoticed into the port at night.” Finally the two, the poet and the novelist, met, over a year after Tipton began the correspondence. Allende is married and lives over a thousand miles from Tipton.
“And thus, one poem at a time, our friendship evolved slowly and the stranger became a dear friend.” She collected two large baskets full of correspondence: “Tipton kept on sending me handmade candles, books, stories, and poems. I replied with parcels of exotic teas of exotic names and homemade cookies.” When they met, Allende said “we hugged each other with the easy confidence of a brother and a sister.” Tipton dedicated his collections, The Wizard of Is, and Letters to a Stranger to Allende. In the description of this relationship one wonders who is whose muse.
The artist longs for the muse, and in the process of longing, creates a song, a play, a poem, a theorem. When the creative person is being visited by the muse, he or she often feels possessed, and enters another world, a world of reverie, of beMused silence. Many writers throughout history have claimed they take dictation from a muse and claim no relationship between their own selves and the selves they create on paper.
There is some evidence that such possession may be demonic. Kathryn Harrison seemed to be helpless in the face of her father’s sexual pursuit of her after he met her when she was in her early twenties, just at the age where her mother had divorced him. Her father, her demonic muse, was her inspiration and was only exorcised by writing. The trance-like state in which these horrors were told resembles autism or catatonia. He, a minister with a Ph.D. in theology, even mated with her in his mother’s house, in the house where he lived with his second wife and daughters, and in the church where he was pastor. Harrison seemed powerless and lived in a catatonic state for years, waiting for her father’s calls and letters. Then, when her mother died, the possession ended, the healing began, and Harrison was able to distance herself, be inspired by the muse of her parents’ destructive love, and get on with life.[36]
Some speak of the stinginess of the Muse, in her inspiration. For example, Edward Dahlberg said, “How hard and usurious is the Muse, exacting the cruelest payment for the mite she gives.”[37]
Writers often speak as if what they write was sent from something within but afar. Poems “come”: British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes said: “Poems get to the point where they are stronger than you are. They come up from some other depth and they find a place on the page.”[38] Poet Anne Sexton said, “Now I tend to become dissatisfied with the fact that I write poems so slowly, that they come to me so slowly. When they come, I write them; when they don’t come, I don’t.”[39] Poet Thom Gunn said, “It’s been my experience that sometimes about ten poems will all come in about two months; other times it will be that one poem will take ages and ages to write.[40]
Some novelists describe their characters as having lives of their own. Some have described the process of writing a novel as finding the characters and then letting them tell the story. The tough part is the beginning, setting down the characters, who later come to life and often screw up the plot that was planned by the writer. Others can’t believe they wrote what they did, that they were capable of it.
Octavio Paz said about his poem “Sun Stone”: “I wrote the first thirty verses as if someone were silently dictating them to me.” The poem is written in hendecasyllables. “I was surprised at the fluidity with which those hendecasyllabic lines appeared one after another. They came from far off and from nearby, from within my own chest.” Paz called the flow of images and syllables a “current.” “Suddenly the current stopped flowing. I read what I’d written. I didn’t have to change a thing.” This was the beginning, and Paz didn’t know where it would end. “A few days later, I tried to get started again, not in a passive way but trying to orient and direct the flow of verses. I wrote another thirty or forty lines. . . I went back to it a few days later and, little by little, I began to discover the theme of the poem and where it was all heading.” [41]
Some writers feel as if they were go-betweens, mediums. Some mysterious force impels them, works through their hands, wiggles through their fingers on the keyboard, shoots from the heart chakra to the throat chakra to the page or the virtual page on the screen in front of the eyes. Of course, not all writers are inspired by muses. Playwright Arthur Miller said that he is always asked the origination of his work. “If I knew I would go there more often to find more.” He said that certain circumstances occur, “in which plays collect and form, like bacteria in a laboratory dish, later to kill or cure.”[42]
Songwriter Tori Amos spoke about the visitation of the muse thus: “You can begin to feel a presence when she comes. I call it a she, like it’s a bath product. I would start to know when she’s coming. And when that happens, I know I have to remember it. I’ll write on my hand or something.” Songwriter Dave Matthews said to Amos’ description, “I get similar visitations often when I’m having a crap. . . . Or driving, or something like that. I have these ideas and they come in and I’m, oh, very excited about them. But then they vanish.” [43]
Inspiration through Substances
The use of substances—alcohol, drugs, herbs—has a long and respectable reputation within the literature on the creative process in writers, artists, and others. Aldous Huxley wrote about the influence of mescaline; Samuel Taylor Coleridge about the influence of opium; Jack Kerouac about amphetamines; Edgar Allen Poe about absinthe; the seventh century Chinese Zen poet Li Po about wine; Fyodor Dostoevsky about whiskey; Allen Ginsberg about LSD.
Michael McClure wrote about the difference in the inspiration achieved with peyote, heroin, and cocaine. “Peyote takes you to lands of religiosity and physical matter—you study the physics of light and shade, and matter and space, and color and blackness, and hot and cold.” He didn’t like heroin as a means of inspiration. “Heroin is a mild thing. After shooting it. . . after the burst of pleasure, a feeling of liberation and bodily expansion, there comes a new state . . . The moment after sent me to write a poem . . . the poem was written and the moment was gone.” McClure said of cocaine that it was “an ace of sunlight that can be snuffed through the nostrils into the brain. For days it lightens the black interiors of the body and lends an ivory cast of sleekness and luminosity to the senses.”[44]
The altered mental state brought about by substances has been thought to enhance creativity—to a certain extent. The partaker must have enough wits about to descend (or ascend) into the abyss to reap what is learned there, but to be able to return and put it down. The danger of turning from creative messenger to addicted body is great, and many writers have succumbed, especially to the siren song of alcohol. Alan Bold put together an anthology of writers writing about drinking. In his introduction, he wrote, “The artist, explorer of emotions, frequently makes an unsteady odyssey across an ocean of drink . . . . The danger, of course, is that drinking will become a surrogate for creativity.”[45]
The poet Charles Baudelaire said, “Always be drunk. That is all: it is the question. You want to stop Time crushing your shoulders, bending you double, so get drunk—militantly.” The drunkenness need not come from alcohol. “Use wine, poetry, or virtue, use your imagination. Just get drunk.” Time is altered when one is drunk, and that is the point. “And if occasionally, on the steps of a palace, a grassy ditch, in the bleak loneliness of your room, you come to, your drunkenness diminished or gone, ask wind, wave, star, bird, clock, everything that turns, that sings, that speaks, and ask the time; and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will reply: “Time to get drunk!” After getting drunk, get drunk again. “Rather than be the martyred slave of Time, get drunk perpetually! Use wine, poetry, or virtue, use your imagination.” [46]
Today such talk is not politically correct, as the dangers of addiction and the climate of recovery and co-dependency groups has led everyone to be cautious about substances. Upton Sinclair sounded a warning in his book, The Cup of Fury, written in the 1950s. In this he detailed the deaths and suicides by alcohol of many contemporary writers and poets. Sinclair said, “When one of a man’s suitors is whiskey, the reader does not have to guess ‘who is going to get him in the end.’” Sinclair himself came from an alcoholic family and spent much of his childhood wondering where his father was and dragging him home from bars. He himself was a teetotaler because of this childhood experience. He said, “I have known many men who drank; they were often men who in other ways kept stern discipline on themselves—so many words to be written every day, so many hours of relaxation, so many hours of research.” However, they were unable to impose self-discipline on themselves in the area of drinking. “And gradually, this one area became the whole area.”[47]
The use of substances has often taken on a mystical, spiritual aspect in the creative process of writers. Ginsberg was quoted as saying that the experimentation with mind-altering drugs by his group did not bring destruction to them. “Nobody I know died of an OD on junk, or committed suicide on acid, though some people did get freaked out on amphetamines. The big killer drug was booze . . . the casualty list of academic poets is enormous.”[48]
Some may attain creative consciousness through lack of substance, through diet. Tess Gallagher talked about how fasting helps her creative process.[49] Fasting brings her to a state of “out-of-body consciousness” that transfers to her poems. “During these periods I don’t do much. I don’t write. . . I try to stay alone during the fasting.” She begins to stand on “an island of calm,” where she can gain some clarity about her life. “It is a time to adjust my vision about what matters, what I should give my energy to. Time during fasting takes on a slower dimension.” The events begin to fit the space, “and the mind need not feel like a room full of accordions, as it often does in so-called normal times.” This time-shift transfers to her poetry. “ These time shifts are a special province of poems because they can happen there more quickly economically, and convincingly than in any other art form, including film.”
Inspiration by Visions and Imagery
Many writers, especially poets, speak of having visions with vivid imagery. William Blake was an unusual child, a child of “uncommon imagination,” according to Ackroyd. He had what psychologists call “eidetic imagery,” a strong visual ability, a strong talent in seeing what some would call hallucinatory images but which are literal, “not afterimages, not dreams, and not daydreams, but real sensory perceptions.” Eidetic imagery, while common in children, often leaves them as they mature. Blake’s capability for such visionary imagery stayed with him throughout his life. When he experienced hardships and rejections, the images appeared to him with increasing strength.
Ackroyd said, “They were real, the child who returned from communion with angels or with Ezekiel knew that he had been blessed with a second sight. Such a gift, however, can lead to isolation or humiliation.”[50] Blake’s visions included seeing the angel Gabriel, and the figures which made up his Songs: of Innocence, of Experience, of Los, his Job, his Milton, and many of the rest of his works. Blake also demonstrated interest in “Alchymists, Astrologers, Calculators, Mystics, Magnetisers, Prophets, and Projectors of every kind,”[51] as have other writers and artists.
Blake locked words and pictures inextricably together, and said that the “words fly about the room” when he was working on his etchings, drawings, and poems. Günter Grass, the German writer, also noted the link: “Invariably the first drafts of my poems combine drawings and verse, sometimes taking off from an image, sometimes from words.”[52] Grass also sculpted images that went with his writing. He described the genesis of his book Show Your Tongue, set in Calcutta, as being necessarily created from images he drew: “The incredible poverty in Calcutta constantly draws the visitor into situations where language is stifled—you cannot find words. Drawing helped me to find words again while I was there.”
Prescott commented on the poet’s visionary imagination saying that the poet sees with the eye of the mind, and the eye of the mind is “the characteristic organ of the poet and visionary. . . The true poet is gifted with a kind of ‘second sight,’ higher and freer than the ordinary sense, and with this gift he becomes a ‘seer’.” He said that since this is a gift, it cannot be rationally explained, and the logical mind can only make cold imitations in false and banal words. “The bane of poetry . . . is the offering of spurious substitutes for the true products of the imagination—of base metals for the true gold.”[53]
The poet, particularly, also seems willing to pursue this vision through studies and explorations of the arcane arts. William Butler Yeats commented on this openness to other worlds: “When a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond his mind?” Yeats also stated that this knowledge is “called up by an image . . . but our images must be given to us, we cannot choose them deliberately.”[54] Yeats spoke of gatekeepers from “that age-long memoried self,” or “personifying spirits,” which bring the creator to a state of soul-crisis, a state of “Mask and Image.” HIs poem, “All Souls’ Night,” calls forth the ghosts of Horton, Florence Emery, and MacGregor Mathers in a meditation on the damned and the blessed. Daniel Halpern, in an edited anthology of visionary poets listed Rumi, Lalla, Mirabai, William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, W. B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hart Crane, and Allen Ginsberg among poets who responded to visions and images.[55]
Allen Ginsberg had a vision of William Blake. While reading Blake he experienced enhanced visual and auditory perception that lasted for several days. “I had the impression of the entire universe as poetry filled with light and intelligence and communication and signals. Kind of like the top of my head coming off, letting in the rest of the universe connected to my own brain.”[56] The sensations and awarenesses continued and Ginsberg tried to tell his friends, and his therapist. “I had some kind of breakthrough or psychotic experience,” he said. They all shunned him, thinking he was crazy. His biographer, Barry Miles, commented, “Though many societies have respected and revered those who have visions, in postwar New York there was no one Allen could talk to about it.” This experience led Ginsberg, who had previously used alcohol and marijuana, to experiment with mind-altering drugs, such as laughing gas, mescaline, heroin, ether, hashish, ayahuasca, and LSD. Ginsberg viewed the initial vision as the most important, “the only really genuine experience I feel I’ve had.”
Plato in Socrates’ dialogue with Ion said that the inspiration that is received by the artists from the mystical connection with the ideal artist proceeds like a chain of iron rings suspended from a magnet. The artists are out of their minds: “the soul of the lyric poet . . . brings songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of . . . gardens and dells . . . like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower.”[57]
Inspiration by Works of Art
Many writers are inspired by works of art produced by other artists. Essayist and nonfiction writer George Dennison was inspired by seeing the black-and-white paintings of de Kooning just after World War II, in 1948.[58] He sat down and looked at them for a whole day. He said he was “absolutely amazed. Amazed, moved, spellbound, mystified, exhilarated.” The paintings spoke to him and for him in an unfathomable way. “Some need, some intellectual/spiritual hunger or incompletion, was being met and answered for the first time.” The strong emotions he felt formed his aesthetic. As he stared at the brush strokes and at the shapes, he saw they were both figure and ground in a dialectical relationship that attracted the eye to move across on the flat plane of the painting’s surface. Dennison began to see the paintings as metaphors for what precedes life, “forms, drawn back, as it were, from proprioception, as if to say that history had rendered the old forms false.”
Dennison met abstract expresssionist Willem de Kooning. De Kooning responded to Dennison’s admiration of his work and held forth on contemporary art and artists. What Dennison felt in his initial viewing of the paintings was their raw, primal power. “A decade later, having established themselves not as events in our psyches but as psyche itself, the same works would begin to appear beautiful.” His relationship with de Kooning celebrated the fact that one artist could intuitively respond to the work of another artist, especially another artist in another medium and of another generation.
Poet Jane Miller finds inspiration in music, film, and in visual arts. She said, “ I love to lose myself in art.” The material is fascinating to her—the strings of the piano or how the clay in the earth of the Southwest differs from that found in Japan. She also admires the concentration, the “center of reality,” that is necessary in doing one’s art. “I am drawn to people who bring tremendous attention to what interests them, as well as being drawn to the made thing.” She plays the flute and the piano as an amateur, and in studying other art forms, she’s found “revealing messages for poetic composition.” She sees a similarity between the documentary film maker and the poet, for both shape the story with surreptitious unwinding, frame by frame.[59]
Friendships and Salons
Friendships between artists of different genres abound in biographical literature. Dan Wakefield described the cross-fertilization among artists in Greenwich Village of New York of the 1950s.[60] Wakefield’s friends were the academic literary people and not the Beats. Centered in the White Horse Tavern where the writers gathered, and the Cedar Tavern where the abstract expressionist visual artists gathered, the avant-garde met, discussed, and appreciated each others’ work, often marrying each other or having affairs.
The Village scene in the 1960s put playwright Sam Shepard, songwriters Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, visual artist Andy Warhol, and many others in proximity. Many poems inspired by paintings, photographs, and symphonies exist; many writers quote lines of popular songs in their novels. Besides being inspired by works of art, many writers are also talented in other domains. People who are talented in several areas are called polymaths; or it is said that they have correlative talents. For example, one cannot read Van Gogh’s Letters to Theo or Michelangelo’s journals, without noticing how eloquent they were. In fact, the writer/artist combination is well known: A very partial list of writers who were also visual artists includes William Carlos Williams (who was also a medical doctor), e.e. Cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, Aldous Huxley, and Henri Michaux.
The scene in Paris in the 1920s centered around Gertrude Stein’s salon has been well documented, as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and many other writers and artists gathered there and began to send their work to the world.
Inspiration through Improvisation
Improvisation seems to be a key part of the creative process in some writers. Hayden Carruth stated that his writing process was like playing jazz. He asked, “What happens, subjectively and spiritually, when a musician improvises freely? He transcends the objective world, including the objectively conditioned ego, and becomes a free, undetermined sensibility in communion with others equally free and undetermined.” Carruth, a fervent jazz aficionado, said that ”my best poems have all been written in states of transcendent concentration and with great speed. . . I have interfused thematic improvisation and . . . metrical predictability.” His poems are music that use meter and rhyme that he disguises within the line so that the reader will not notice. “Jazz gives us a new angle of vision, a new emphasis . . . in creative intuition .”[61]
Jazz is improvisational energy, and the poet David Steinglass talked about how energy is translated: “Poem ideas in my notebooks fly stories like colored ribbon. . . one trick of writing poems is translating energy—the stories—into lines—the poem. Ideas are mostly accidents, circumstances the act of writing lets wander into our own possibilities.”[62]
Poet Allen Ginsberg, during a teaching stint at New York University, noted the jazz improvisational techniques of many of the beat writers. In speaking about Kerouac’s Visions of Cody, he noted that “each section is written in a session of writing like a jazz musician. It’s like blowing until the energy is gone. Gertrude Stein also did this. She’d write it all out in a focus of attention.”[63]
The poet James Merrill used automatic writing as an improvisational technique: “Writing down whatever came into one’s head, giving oneself over to every impulse—reasonable and unreasonable—concrete and abstract. . . . a means of granting oneself permission to speak from the heart, the depths of one’s unconscious, the edges of the language.”[64] William Butler Yeats used both his own and his wife’s automatic writing as inspiration for work. Poet Octavio Paz also engaged in the practice. Automatic writing was recommended by Natalie Goldberg in her “how to” book, Writing Down the Bones. She recommended would-be writers write for a timed period, and that they (1) keep their writing hand moving; (2) don’t cross out; (3) don’t worry about grammar and punctuation; (4) try to lose control; (5) don’t think; (6) and “go for the jugular. If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.”[65]
Dreams and the Creative Process
As noted above, many creative writers trust their dreams. Like other artists and musicians, they realize that the other side, the dark side, the night side, is very important to the creative process. Dreams have inspired many poems, stories, novels. Poet and writer Tess Gallagher said, “I began to experience a kind of psychic suffocation which expressed itself in poems that I copied fully composed from my dreams.”[66] Her dreams seemed to predict the dissolution of her marriage, and her poems taken from her dreams were witnesses to what was happening inside her. Prose writer George Dennison said dreams helped him write: “Dreams are the achieved poetry of the unconscious.” Robert Louis Stevenson called dreams “man’s internal theater.” Tennyson said he dreamt his poetry, which came to him whole, in long passages. Bunyon said that Pilgrim’s Progress came to him in a dream.
Novelist Philip Roth felt that dreams not only inspired him, they also guided him. In his memoir of his father, Patrimony, he dreamt, a few days before his father’s death, of a gray ship in the Newark harbor. He knew that such a dream on such an occasion was commonplace, but he still meditated on it.
“I lay in bed till it was light, thinking of all the family history compressed into that snippet of silent dream-film; just about every major theme of his life was encapsulated there, everything of significance to both of us, starting with his immigrant parents’ transatlantic crossing in steerage, extending to his grueling campaign to get ahead, the battle to make good against so many obstructive forces—during those silent seconds on its journey north, consecrating even workaday Newark . . . I understood that it wasn’t that my father was aboard the ship but that my father was the ship.[67]
Roth noted that the dream helped him break through the writer’s block he was experiencing during the excruciating months of his father’s slip into death, and to write the book.
Differences Between Novelists’ and Poets’ Creative Processes
The novelist Norman Mailer, when he was learning how to write while a student at Harvard, made a vow to write three thousand words a day, every day. His first wife Bea, said of his writing habits a few years later: “There was never a question of waiting for the muse to descend.“[68] He worked through the whole outlines of the books he was writing: how many chapters, how each chapter would move the plot forward. He had three by five inch cards on which he kept track of the structure and the personalities of the characters. He would shuffle these to make sure he was on track. He wrote about 25 pages a week on the first draft of the 750 page manuscript.
Gore Vidal, in his memoir, noted that Mailer majored in engineering and said: “I have a theory that the mind of an engineer, though well suited for many things, is ill suited for either literature or politics.” Vidal said that the engineer seeks to have all things converge or yoke together, “while the natural writer or politician knows, instinctively, that nothing ever really connects except in what we imagine science to be.” Vidal said that “Literature . . . requires a divergent mind.” However, engineers such as Mailer and Solzhenitsyn have convergent minds. Vidal compared F.D.R.’s “inspired patternless arabesques as a politician, artfully dodging this way and that, to the painstaking engineer Jimmy Carter, doggedly trying to make it all add up, and failing.”[69]
Not only engineers and novelists, but poets and prose writers work differently. The poet Louis Simpson commented about how prose writers just don’t understand how a poet works. “Descriptions of poetry by men who are not poets is usually ridiculous, for they describe rational thought processes.”[70] In one novel, George Orwell described a poet at work. Simpson said, “This is completely false; prose may be written in this way, but not poetry. A poet begins by losing control; he does not choose his thoughts; they seem to be choosing him.” Rhythms come from the unconscious, and the poet hears the poem much as a music composer does.
The Creative Process in Self-help Books
Others have less heartfelt and personal reasons for writing. Go to your local bookstore. On the shelves there, you will find many books in a genre of self-help books that purport to help the would-be writer overcome writer’s block, and write what he or she needs to write. The books range from the practical, with titles like this: How to Write a Short Stories or The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach; to the provocative, Writing Down the Bones, or the mysterious, The Artist’s Way: The spiritual path to higher creativity.[71] These writers help the would-be writer with everything from the elements of a plot to plumbing the inner depths.
My local newspaper’s entertainment section said that the country-western singer Kathy Matthias used the 12-step program of The Artist’s Way to break through a period of difficulty in writing songs the children’s author Stephanie Tolan followed the same course herself in 1995 when her personal life and writing life were in crisis. This is anecdotal evidence that these self-help books help the self. The danger seems to be that reading the book and doing the course will substitute for doing the work. After the book comes the work.
At base, though, the proof is in the pudding: the poem, the story, the screenplay, the lyrics, the play, the novel, the essay, the journalistic feature that must go out into the world. All by itself. No matter how helpful the therapeutic voice in the how-to do-it book, how kind and how caring, the work that may be produced by the process must go out there and join the flurries and blizzards of manuscripts in the storms assaulting editors and publishers and agents.
Ernest Hemingway had little use for the how-to in writing: “There is very little to say about writing . . . unless you are a professional explainer. If you can do it you don’t have to explain it. If you can not do it, no explanation will ever help.”[72] There may be a danger in giving advice to novices. John Gardner’s teaching, his advice to writers, may outlive his novels. Rilke’s advice to young poets is more often quoted than his poems.[73]
In summary, the sources of the creative process in writers seem to fit certain patterns when one reads both the psychological literature written by people who are not creative writers but who study them, and the interviews and biographical literature written by people who are creative writers. The patterns seem to be organic; that is, stemming from within, and seem to involve processes that seek to plumb the depths. The linear approaches advocated by certain thinkers who show that the creative process is a series of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, steps, do not seem to be primary in the descriptions of the creative process in writers given by themselves.
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NOTES
[3].. Perkins, 1981.
[4].. Prescott, 1922, p. 139.
[5].. “In the janusian process, multiple opposites or antitheses are conceived simultaneously, either as existing side by side or as equally operative, valid, or true.” Rothenberg, 1990, p. 15.
[6].. Quoted in Rothenberg, 1990, p. 16.
[7]. Ghiselin, 1952.
[8].. Csikszentmihalyi, 1990. In a further exposition of the state of flow, see Csikszentmihalyi, M., Rathunde, K., & Whalen, S. 1994. In this study, the authors noted that flow is difficult to achieve, but when it is achieved, the students want to come back to the activity, as they find it intrinsically rewarding. For young writers, this would probably occur in both reading and in writing.
[9].. In Hodges, 1992. [From James Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson,L.L.D. (1791). Aetat.28. To Angela Burdett-Coutts, Nov. 12, 1842: The Letters of Charles Dickens: The Pilgrim Edition (1965-81), iii, p. 367. Pacing quote, p. 216.]
[10].. Ornstein (1993) would call them “high gainers,” or “introverts,” who have extremely high sensitivity to stimulation. The Dabrowski theorists may call them “overexcitable” and “sensitive.”
[11].. Ornstein, 1993; Hodges, 1992, p. 217. Gildner has a poem called “The Runner.” Irving’s wrestling is well-known; he played a wrestling coach in one of the movies made from his novels.
[12]. Dillard, 1988.
[13].. Harrison, 1991, p. 317.
[14].. Woolf, 1954, p. 142.
[15].. Sarton, 1973, p. 34.
[16].. Price, 1989, p. 51.
[17].. Hosmer, .
[18].. Yeats, p. 38.
[19].. See Gooch’s 1993 biography of O’Hara.
[20].. See Taylor, E. (1996, May 8), Hal Sirowitz, interview: www.tripod.com:80/living/interview/9605l/sirowitz.html.
[21]. See Garner, D. www.salon1999.com/weekly/interview960902.html
[22]. Blank, p. 102.
[23].. Flanagan, 1992, p. 129.
[24].. Kelsay on Robert Olen Butler, 1996, p. 45.
[25].. Gallagher, 1983, pp. 137 & 147.
[26].. Gardner, 1977, p. 13.
[27].. Levertov, 1973, p. 205.
[28].. Much of this list was taken from the Table of Contents of the poetry anthology of Buddhism in contemporary American poetry, Beneath a Single Moon (1992). Edited by Johnson and Paulenich.
[29].. Personal communication, Sarah Wood, 3/18/97.
[30].. This is described in Miles, 1989.
[32].. Ai. Exhibit “Hand of the Poet.” New York Public Library. January, 1997.
[33].. Graves, 1948, pp. 9-10.
[34]. See Seymour, 1995. Three of his muses were Laura Riding, Cindy Lee, and Margot Callas. Seymour said, “The muse, standing for the intuitive feelings Graves held to be vital to the poetic spirit, was his defence against an increasingly mechanized and technological age which threatened the sacred gift of the imagination. From 1960 until he was no longer able to hold a pen, Graves always had muses. His need of them was far greater than theirs of him” (p. 387-388).
[35].. Interview with May Sarton by K. Saum (1983), p. 94.
[36].. Harrison, 1997.
[37]. Dahlberg, 1970, p. 177.
[38].. Interview with Ted Hughes by D. Heinz, 1995, p. 67.
- Interview with Ted Hughes by D. Heinz, 1995, p. 67. with Anne Sexton by B. Kevles, 1968, in G. Plimpton (Ed.), 1989, p. 281.
[40].. Interview with Thom Gunn by C. Wilmer, 1995, p. 146.
[41].. Interview with Octavio Paz, 1991, by A. MacAdam, p. 113-114.
[42].. Miller, p. 86.
[43]. Two for the road. Newsweek, July 27, 1998, p. 56.
[44]. McClure, 1966, pp. 32-49.
[45].. Bold, pp. 5, 7.
[46].. Bold, p. 87-88.
[47]. Sinclair, 1956, p. 171.
[48].. Wakefield, 1995, p. 187.
[49].. Gallagher, 1983, p. 120.
[50]. Ackroyd, pp. 24-25.
[51]. from Reid, (1800) The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis, p. 91, quoted in Ackroyd, p. 209.
[52].Günter Grass, in Gaffney & Simon Paris Review interview, p. 213 and p. 217.
[53]. Prescott, p. 139.
[54]. Yeats, Autobiography, p. 164.
[55]. See Halpern, 1994.
[56].. in Miles, p. 100.
[57].. The Ion, in The Dialogues of Plato, p. 144.
[58].. Dennison., 1983, p. 76.
[59]. Miller, p. 67.
[60].. Cf. Wakefield.
[61].. Carruth, 1983, pp. 30-32.
[62].. Steinglass, 1992, p. 271.
[63].. Schapell, p. 235
[64].. Merrill, 1992, p. 89.
[65].. Goldberg, 1986, p. 8.
[66].. Gallagher, 1983, p. 121; Dennison, 1983, p. 91.
[67].. Roth, p. 236.
[68].. in Mills, p. 82.
[69].. Vidal, p.p. 238-239.
[70].. Simpson, p. 198.
[71].. See Sorenson, 1994; Behn & Twichell (Eds.), 1992; Goldberg, 1986; Cameron, 1992.
[72].. Hemingway, p. 88.
[73]. Gardner, On Moral Fiction; Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.