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The Nature of Creative Thought - Part 5

Richard Wilbur, of the Department of English, Harvard Uni­versity, traced through the development of a piece of poetry:

A poem begins with a feeling of inadequacy. That's the preparation stage, or part of it, anyway. The preparation for a poem may also include the development of some very slight notion as to what ele­ments the coming poem may contain. But at this point, these elements will be completely awash and unrelated in the mind. It's important that they be unrelated. The incubation period of a poem may be short or long, but for me it involves first a retreat from language, the cultivation of a state of apparent stupidity.

... At this stage in the coming of a poem, I haven't any idea as to what the paraphrasable content of the poem is going to be when it comes—its prose meaning. I don't know what the poem is going to "say." At most I'll have some ideas as to the mood of the poem, its probable size, its probable scope, the extent to which it's going to ramify. The poem doesn't begin with a meaning, it works towards meaning—it finds out what it's about.

... The stage of creation called illumination seems to come at vari­
ous points and in various ways__ For me, the poem is likely to start

with the recognition of some resemblance between ideas or fields of

experience___ You don't know where you're going, but you do know

you're going somewhere. In other words, you have an overriding premonition that the poem is going to take shape. The writing of the poem is a matter of making moment-by-moment choices among pos­sibilities proposed by the unconscious.

John Ferren also made a remark that may point up the essential differences between the approach to creativity of the artist and that of the scientist. He said, "Traditionally, scientists speak con­servatively from a sense that truth must not be betrayed, and artists speak extravagantly from a sense that truth is a large affair anyhow, and it is all right to snipe at it from any unsuspected corner."

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