ABSTRACT

Do poets make their poems alone, or are they aided by supernatural powers? Do poets, to use a word that began to be associated with them only in the Renaissance, create their own creations? If poets create their own creations, does poetic creativity encroach on the creativity of the Creator, the Creator with a capital “C”? If poets do not create their own creations but are aided by the muses, can these muses, the daughters of Memory, be appropriated to the Creator, to the Spirit, or must poetic inspiration always stand apart from the unified ideological field of a world that was created in six days by God? Inspiratio was the Latin translation of Greek enthousiasmos, which means the state of “having a god within,” to which I would add “having a god within that wants to come out as an artifact.” The word is cited in E.K.’s notes to Spenser’s “October” eclogue and stands behind the phrase “goodly fury” in the last complete book of The Faerie Queene (6 proem 2). In aspiring to add something to the world that is totally new, is the poet or the artist in some sense another god, alter deus, like Michelangelo, who was called il divino? Is the laurel crown a halo, glowing with empyreal fire?