The Enigma of the Creative Process

Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”
Wislawa Symborska, “The Poet and the World”

The creative process is a vast mystery. Creativity—what the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott calls “the doing that arises out of being”—is at the core of what is most original in us; it is at the root of our key discoveries, large and small, yet no one knows fully how it works. There are methods and explanations, intuitions, arguments—there are theories (I, too, have had them)—but there is no single road to Damascus. The enormous literature about creativity, much of it helpful, can only take us so far. Sooner or later, even the most devoted empiricist comes face to face with the enigma of creative thinking. Like Whitman, each of us contains multitudes. We surpass our own restraints. Whether we peek into the unconscious of the scientist or peer into the laboratory of the artist, we inspire a mystery. Every creative thinker is participating in a voyage of discovery, but the person who landed is not always the same as the one who set out. The journey changes us. We are strangers to ourselves.

“To create,” as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is to “bring into existence.” Creativity is the celebration of the unexpected. The choreographer who walks into a white room before the dancers have arrived, the composer who sits down at the black and white keys in the early morning, the painter who gazes at the empty surface of the canvas (Edward Hopper glared at his for months at a time), the poet who peers down at a piece of paper that suddenly looks as vast and empty as central Iowa in winter (I went to Grinnell College)—are all participating in a deep and mysterious process. They are trying to birth something into existence that did not previously exist, that will have a life apart from them. It will involve both what they know and what they don’t know, what they suspect and what they discover. All works of art, deliberate works of mind (poems, stories, novels, paintings and sculptures, dance and musical compositions) are surprises that stand against time, against forgetfulness and oblivion. “There has always been something miraculous about the birth of outstanding works,” as Czeslaw Milosz once said, “and a Ministry of Culture and Art could just as well be called a Ministry of Miracles.”

What every type of creator has to go on is preparation, energy, vitality, nerve. (“You just go on your nerve,” Frank O’Hara said in “Personism: A Manifesto”: “If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, “Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.””). As in running, patience and training ally with urgency. Creativity demands curiosity and immersion, a gift for asking questions, which lead to other questions, a sense of wonder, a capacity to follow what you also lead. What the artist has to go on is hard work, craftiness, invention, and experience, the present moment, the way of life itself. Emerson said that “the one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why.” He believed that “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.” And he quoted Oliver Cromwell, who said that “A man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.”

I have been writing poetry for nearly thirty-five years—I have written three prose books about it—and yet I still don’t know what poetry is. I don’t know what music is either—who can explain the combination of beauty and pain that pierces the notes? There is probably something immutable about the need to make art, though the boundaries of our genres keep shifting. The imagination is defiant and limitless.

I consider a poem a verbal construct, an event in language—Wallace Stevens characterized poetry as “a revelation of words by means of the words”; Howard Nemerov said that poetry is simply “getting something right in language”—though there is probably a Zen poet in a monastery somewhere in Japan who thinks of poems without words. After all, John Cage created a piece of music that was made entirely of silence, four minutes and thirty-three seconds worth, to be exact. I have listened to it played—or should I say that I have seen it not played?—on innumerable occasions, and each time it was different.

I may think of the poet as a linguistic maker, an investigator and protector of language, a user of words (Gerard Manley Hopkins characterized it as “speech framed…to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest in meaning”), but that doesn’t tell us what poetry is. The Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges believed that “Poetry is something that cannot be defined without oversimplifying it. It would be like attempting to define the color yellow, love, the fall of leaves in autumn.” Borges liked Plato’s designation of the poet as “that light substance, winged and sacred.” A. E. Housman, who was such an exacting classical scholar, came to believe that poetry is actually “more physical than intellectual.” When someone from America wrote and asked him to define poetry, he replied with a credo based on contact.

He said:

I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat,
but that I thought we both recognized the object by symptoms which it
provokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connection with
another object by Eliphaz the Termanite: “A spirit passed before my face:
the hair of my flesh stood up.” Experience has taught me, when I am shaving
of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry
strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This
particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another
which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water in the
eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from
one of Keats’s letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, “everything
that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.”

It’s striking to me that Emily Dickinson also defined poetry by contact. Here is her compelling test:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm
me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were
taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know. Is there
any other way.

Dickinson recognized true poetry by the extremity—the actual physical intensity—of her response to it. She doesn’t say she knows poetry because of any intrinsic qualities of poetry itself. Rather, she knows it by what it does to her, and she trusts her own intimate response. Of course, only the strongest poetry could effect such a response. Her aesthetic is clear: she wants to be surprised and transported, to be struck by the lightning of words, by what one of her poems calls “Bolts of Melody.”

The classical history of poetry suggests that a poem is a made thing. The word poiesismeans “making” and the oldest term for the poet means “maker.” It was a noble word. The Greek version of the Hebrew bible, the Septuagint, commences: En arche epoisen ho theos ton ouranon kai ten gen—“In the beginning God made (epoisen) the heaven and the earth.” Medieval and Renaissance poets used the word makers, as in “courtly makers,” as a precise equivalent for poets. The word poem came into English in the sixteenth century and has been with us ever since to denote a form of fabrication, a verbal composition. Ben Jonson referred to the art of poetry as “the craft of making.” The old Irish word cerd, meaning “people of the craft,” was a designation for artisans, including poets. It is cognate with the Greek word kerdos, meaning “craft, craftiness.” Two basic metaphors for the art of poetry in the classical world were carpentry and weaving. “Whatever else it may be,” W. H. Auden said, “a poem is a verbal artifact which must be skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.”

All this suggests that art demands craft, planning, skill. It is a form of problem solving—problems are a stimulus, a help, and engender other problems. What the poet does seems akin not just to the work of the carpenter and the weaver but also to the practice of the mathematician, the physicist, the composer, to all those who create intentional works of mind. Our intellectual and expressive labor, whatever it is, demands obstinate labor, disinterestedness and gusto, a long foreground of learning, immersion in a field, self-surrender to an idea, absolute concentration, which is as focused as prayer. We commit ourselves to discipline and labor, to long investigative periods of conscious and conscientious work.

Yet there is always a point where voluntary effort, like voluntary memory, comes to an end, and something else, something involuntary—some unknown force—has to take over. “Henceforward, in using the word Poetry,” Robert Graves writes in On English Poetry, I mean both the controlled and uncontrollable parts of the art taken together, because each is helpless without the other.” Plato famously declared:

There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are
the source. This seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt
passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry, glorifying the countless
mighty deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. But if any
man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses,
persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and
his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of
madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found.

Art is often compared to passion, to mania, to childlike play, to the unconscious itself. It is related to all of them but needs a guiding compass. The imagination, as opposed to the strictly rational intellect, is allied to dreams and reveries, to unconscious mechanisms of displacement and identification, of sublimation, projection, condensation. We go to work on our ideas—the mathematician Henri Poincaré considered the sudden illumination “a manifest sign of long, unconscious, inner work”—and, hopefully, our ideas go to work on us. This is true not just in making art but in all creative processes. Poincaré also asserted in his essay “Mathematical Creation” that “the role of this unconscious work in mathematical creation appears to me incontestable.” I am reminded, too, that after a long investigative period Kekule solved the chemical problem of the Benzene molecule, a ring rather than a chain of carbon atoms, when in a dream he saw a snake swallowing its own tail.

There is always something unconscious in the making of art, something beyond artistic control and training. “Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will,” Shelley writes in his romantic defense of poetry:

A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot
say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.

The creative process, which is never entirely at the dispensation of the rational will, is often a little incomprehensible to the creators themselves, which is why artists have so many superstitions and rituals of preparation. There can be something terrifying in knowing you are courting a process that demands moving beyond will power and conscious labor. In art, readiness is all, and some emphasize the practical part of the work. “In order to be creative,” the choreographer Twyla Tharp says pragmatically, “You have to know how to prepare to be creative.” Thus one goes for long walks; another runs; one keeps a piece of fruit nearby (Schiller liked the smell of rotten apples coming out from the under the lid of his desk); one primes a canvas; one listens to a piece by Bach (Stravinsky began each morning in his studio by sitting down at the piano and playing a Bach fugue); one prays to the Muse.

These are dependable rituals to try to invoke inspiration, which means in-breathing, indwelling. Inspiration can be coaxed but not commanded. It can be invited by humility and conscious effort. There is no hierarchy among fields. I am sure that “it visits all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination” (Wislawa Szymborska).

There are many ways of calling out “Help me, O Heavenly Muse,” which advertises a dependence on a force beyond the intellect. You may locate the Muse outside yourself—you may call her “Laura” (as Petrarch does) or “Beatrice” (as Dante does), or name her “Mnemosyne” (goddess of memory) or “Clio” (personification of history). Or you can place it as a force inside yourself, an interior terrain. Thus you can call this inspiring force creative intuition (as Jacque Maritain does), or the uncanny (as Freud does), or the collective unconscious (as Jung does).

The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca calls it duende, which he used in a special Andalusian sense as a term for the obscure power and penetrating inspiration of art. He described it, quoting Goethe on Paganini, as “a mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains.” For him, the concept of duende, a force that drives through all the arts—we have no exact English language equivalent for the Spanish term—was associated with the spirit of earth, with visible anguish, irrational desire, demonic enthusiasm, and a fascination with death. (“The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible,” Lorca says.) Duende means something like artistic inspiration in the presence of death. It is an erotic form of dark inspiration. It has an element of mortal panic and fear. It has the power of wild abandonment.

Creativity everywhere seems to demand just such an element of abandonment. It incites something in us that is unexpected, dangerous, and liberating, a radical freedom. Each of has a secret and ongoing inner life. I believe that art in general—and poetry in particular—rescues us from a state of what the psychoanalyst George Groddeck strikingly calls “inner muteness.” In a brilliant essay about language, Groddeck writes:

Man’s most personal thought is speechless, subterranean, unconscious,
and the struggle of the creative forces with mute nature constitutes
man’s innermost life. The inner muteness is the real human personality
whether one chooses to call it soul or spirit or anything else. It is common
to us all, the common factor, the basic human entity. Yet creative ability
is a human being’s most valuable gift.

Creative ability in general—and especially creative ability manifested through language—has the capacity to deliver us from an abyss of silence, from inchoate thought and feeling, and thus bring us into consciousness.

There is no true poetry without conscious craft, absorbed attention, absolute concentration. There is no true poetry without unconscious invention. The reader, too, enters into a relationship between the controlled and the uncontrollable aspects of the art.

Art seems to demand habits of vigilance: concentration, study, memory, faith. It demands surrender. Thus the older poet often advises the younger poet: give yourself up to the imaginative process, mystery abides. So W. S. Merwin, for example, remembers his teacher John Berryman giving him advice in the years just after the Second WorldWar:

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

Berryman also said that
the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

A transfiguring passion. A force beyond the confines of the conscious self.

It seems useful to remember, too, that creativity—an animating passion—does not take place in a vacuum. It emerges from a complex network, an environment. It builds on, or modifies, or radically changes, or refutes, what has come before. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly reminds us that “Edison’s or Einstein’s discoveries would be inconceivable without the prior knowledge, without the intellectual and social network that stimulated their thinking, and without the social mechanisms that recognized and spread their discoveries.” Creativity, which always has a context, is transformational. It begins with periods of preparation and incubation, centers on moments of insight, which in turn lead to periods of evaluation and elaboration.

There are many paths to the creative breakthrough, the moment of insight, the sudden illumination—a moment of joyous release and transfiguring intensity, of freedom and transport. George Roualt confessed: “In truth, I have painted by opening my eyes day and night on the perceptible world, and also by closing them from time to time that I might better see the vision blossom and submit itself to orderly arrangement.” Making art is an act of attention, yet sometimes one open one’s eyes and sometimes one closesthem. Paul Valéry the most self-conscious of poets, spoke of “une ligne donné”—the given line—and suggested that everything else was labor, a matter of making. Yet he also declared: “The fact is that every act of the mind itself is always somehow accompanied by a certain more or less perceptible atmosphere of indetermination.”

André Malraux said in speaking of Goya that “All truly profound art requires the creator to abandon himself to certain powers which he invokes but cannot control.” Lorca pictured the creative process as a kind of fantastic combat with one’s own demon, which is closely akin to the way that Charles Baudelaire also viewed it. Baudelaire talked of “the labor by which a reverie becomes a work of art.” Here, for example, is how the French poet, who, after all, inaugurates our modernity, describes a friend, the artist Constantin Guys, obsessively working through the night. It’s late when Baudelaire drops in on him, and the rest of Paris is slumbering in peaceful oblivion: “…how he stands there, bent over his table, scrutinizing the sheet of paper just as intently as he does the objects around him by day; how he stabs away with his pencil, his pen, his brush; how he spurts water from his glass to the ceiling and tries his pen on his shirt; how he pursues his work swiftly and intensely, as though he were afraid that his images might escape him; thus he is combative, even when alone, and parries his own blows.”

In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin links this description to the opening stanza of “The Sun” (“Le Soleil”), probably the only place in Les Fleurs du Mal where Baudelaire, struggling in the zone between word and thing, portrays the modern poet at work. It comes from the section “Parisian Scenes” (“Tableaux Parisiens”):

Late in this cruel season when the sun
scourges alike the city and the fields,
parching the stubble and sinking into slums
where shuttered hovels hide vile appetites,
I venture out alone to drill myself
in what must seem an eerie fencing-match,
dueling in dark corners for a rhyme
and stumbling over words like cobblestones
where now and then realities collide
with lines I dreamed of writing long ago.

Any account of the imaginative process must include such creative excitation, such artistic dueling. We are trying to account for a zone where Baudelaire fences with words and Guy skirmishes with a black pencil, where Nijinsky sails into a long floating leap that defies gravity, Picasso thinks on canvas with a blue paintbrush, and Charlie Parker turns an alto saxophone into a gleaming instrument of transport. It is a place where works of art take on an irrational inner glow, a majestic strangeness.

I have been emphasizing what is emergent and transforming in the making of art, its entry onto fresh shores, unknown terrain. Poetry puts language in a state of emergence, a state of emergency. “You will write,” Gertrude Stein advised a friend, “if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting.”

In an immensely useful, wonderfully funny, and slightly perverse essay entitled “Not Knowing,” Donald Barthelme states that “It’s appropriate to pause and say that the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.” He suggests that “Writing is a process of dealing with not knowing, a forcing of what and how.” Thus does the writer become a seeker, an explorer. Art turns into a quest for the unknown.

So, too, in her Nobel Lecture for 1996, “The Poet and the World,” the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska declared that “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” She announced that this deceptive little phrase, which she values so highly, is “small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.” Symborska continues: “If Isaac Newton had never said to himself, “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones, and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself, “I don’t know,” she probably would have ended up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families and ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying, “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once, but twice, to Stockholm…” It seems that in order to get anywhere scientists, like writers, must keep on repeating “I don’t know,” which I have taken as a mantra in confronting the enigma of creative thinking.

Let’s say, for example, that I wanted to write a poem about not knowing. I thought of it as a potential hymn to the unknown, to some of the things that had eluded me, mistakes I had made, what I had overlooked and missed. This seemed to me a particular kind of problem—how can you write what you don’t know?—and I walked around for months thinking (and not thinking) about it. One day a friend called up and asked me to give a talk—he failed to mention that it was a keynote address—about the creative process, which I don’t know very much about, though that didn’t stop me from writing a prose book about artistic inspiration. I had wanted to think more seriously about it. I agreed out of friendship (money was not mentioned) and because the topic seems to me of great import and interest. It is immensely stimulating. Deadlines also tend to focus one’s attention nicely, a little like walking the gangplank.

So, too, I felt enabled by a guidebook, Brewster Ghiselin’s ground-breaking anthology, The Creative Process, which I have long admired. Thus I had close at hand statements and testimonies, which I consider subject rhymes, by such iconic figures as Jung (“Creativeness, like the freedom of the will, contains a secret”), Picasso (“The picture is not thought out and determined beforehand, rather while it is being made it follows the mobility of thought”), and Einstein (“Full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished”).

I am a great admirer of the moral conscience in Polish poetry. I’m struck by the way that such poets as Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz, who died a few weeks ago—it was an enormous loss—move between historical consciousness and metaphysical concerns. I admire Polish poetry for its unfashionable clarity, its democratic ethos, its commitment to an idiosyncratic individuality, its suspicion of absolutes and rejection of tyranny, its humane values, its deep humility before the plenitude of the world, its quest for the stability of truth. It has long seemed to me worthwhile to try to import some of that sensibility, that conscientiousness, into American poetry.

This summer I was sitting in a seminar in Krakow that I co-direct, and one of my students passed out a poem by Milosz that struck me anew. I had read the poem “Account” many times before, but suddenly the first line jumped out at me was as if I were seeing it for the first time. I took it personally. Milosz wrote: “The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.”

I recognized—who doesn’t?—that the history of my own stupidity could also fill many volumes. I couldn’t write all those books (“The history of my stupidity will not be written,” Milosz also confessed. “For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious”), but it did seem to me possible to write something from the late middle of my life, something around, say, volume 3, chapter 5. My title, which came first, struck me as both funny and true. In the next few days, some of the things I didn’t know, things I had missed, mistakes I had made, began to flood me. My catalogue demanded a structure and I began to arrange the omissions, miscues, and errors into an order. My notion was to move from the miniature to the gigantic, to begin small and end large, gradually increasing the sense of one’s own unawareness. One of Milosz’s stanzas also affected me deeply. He wrote:

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

It also seemed important to include the suffering of others that had bypassed me, that had gone on, gone by, unawares. A couple of apologies seemed in order. One wants a larger consciousness, a deeper seriousness, a fuller understanding. I would begin with the memory of taking a wrong turn and end with a statement about God, who has always eluded me.

After that, I decided to write an essay on the creative process that would focus on the character of not knowing, on the state of unknowingness, on the art of indeterminacy, on the sense of freedom that attends all authentic discoveries. What we don’t know could fill many volumes, scores, and canvases. What we don’t know can instigate our curiosity—why don’t we know it?—and enlist our sympathy, demanding an answer, unleashing our questions, inspiring us to create what we do know. The creative process speaks to what is most daring and original in us. It is our own spark of divinity, a doing—an action—that arises out of being. Creativity is a way of surprising and enlarging ourselves. It is a vast mystery, a way of giving form to life, a kind of knowing.

It is a gift.

Edward Hirsch