inspiration

inspiration, afflatus, fury, frenzy, especially when qualified by divine or poetic, all designate the seemingly involuntary element in the arts of expression for which the artist often holds a power outside himself responsible.

Inspiration may distinctively imply a preternatural enlightening and quickening of the mind and connote, especially when used by religious persons, the intervention of or as if of such a supernatural influence as the Holy Spirit

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among such men there remains a . . . belief in what is vaguely called inspiration. They know by hard experience that there are days when their ideas flow freely and clearly, and days when they are dammed up damnably— Mencken

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Often, from its use in connection with the authorship of the Scriptures, inspiration implies supernatural or supranatural communication of knowledge

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has the highest aspect of Greek religion ever been better expressed than by Wordsworth himself, to whom ... it came by inspiration and not from books?— Inge

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Afflatus distinctively applies to the inspiring influence rather than to the process or its effects

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the artists and poets who but once in their lives had known the divine afflatus, and touched the high level of the best— Henry James

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we imagine that a great speech is caused by some mysterious afflatus that descends into a man from on high— Eastman

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but it also may name a quality rather than an influence or an operation

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he never again achieved that delicate balance of cold, scientific investigation and imaginative afflatus— Scalia

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Fury and frenzy emphasize the emotional excitement that attends artistic creation and the tendency of the artist to be carried out of himself.

Fury found most often in the phrases "poetic fury" and "divine fury," does not in ordinary use imply extreme agitation; it characteristically connotes profound ecstasy induced by the poet's vision or conception

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they are so beloved of the Gods, that whatsoever they write, proceeds of a divine fury— Sidney

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in an age of formalism, poetic fury itself became a formal requirement— Babbitt

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Frenzy usually implies agitation rather than rapture, and stresses the imaginative or inventive element in creation, sometimes to the exclusion of any extraneous influence

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does he compose in a frenzy of mystical exaltation or does he work out his lines slowly and even laboriously?— Kilby

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caught the first fire of the writer's frenzy in the classroom when a long dead poet was being discussed— Dock Leaves

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Mencken and his Mercury were anything but cold. They were always in a state of frenzy— Angoff

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Analogous words: enlightenment, illumination (see corresponding verbs at ILLUMINATE): *ecstasy, rapture, transport: *revelation, vision, apocalypse, prophecy