To the Greeks this problem of the conditions of poetic production,
and the places occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness
in any artistic work, had a peculiar fascination. We find it in
the mysticism of Plato and in the rationalism of Aristotle. We
find it later in the Italian Renaissance agitating the minds of
such men as Leonardo da Vinci. Schiller tried to adjust the
balance between form and feeling, and Goethe to estimate the
position of self-consciousness in art. Wordsworth's definition of
poetry as 'emotion remembered in tranquillity' may be taken as an
analysis of one of the stages through which all imaginative work
has to pass; and in Keats's longing to be 'able to compose without
this fever' (I quote from one of his letters), his desire to
substitute for poetic ardour 'a more thoughtful and quiet power,'
we may discern the most important moment in the evolution of that
artistic life. The question made an early and strange appearance
in your literature too; and I need not remind you how deeply the
young poets of the French romantic movement were excited and
stirred by Edgar Allan Poe's analysis of the workings of his own
imagination in the creating of that supreme imaginative work which
we know by the name of THE RAVEN.
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