love? It was because thwarted
love filled him with intensest longing. So with his thirst for purity,
for religion, for worldly vanities. Any desire, be it fierce enough, and
hindered from immediate satisfaction, may engender poetry. As Joyce
Kilmer phrases it,

Nothing keeps a poet
In his high singing mood,
Like unappeasable hunger
For unattainable food.
[Footnote: _Apology_.]

But the poet would not have us imagine that we have here sounded the
depths of the mystery. Aspiration may call down inspiration, but it is
not synonymous with it. Mrs. Browning is fond of pointing out this
distinction. In _Aurora Leigh_ she reminds us, "Many a fervid man
writes books as cold and flat as gravestones." In the same poem she
indicates that desire is merely preliminary to inspiration. There are,
she says,

Two states of the recipient artist-soul;
One forward, personal, wanting reverence,
Because aspiring only. We'll be calm,
And know that when indeed our Joves come down,
We all turn stiller than we have ever been.

What is this mysterious increment, that must be added to aspiration
before it becomes poetically creative? So far as a mere layman can
understand it, it is a sudden arrest, rather than a satisfaction, of the
poet's longing, for genuine satisfaction would kill the aspiration, and
leave the poet heavy and phlegmatic. Inspiration, on the contrary, seems
to give him a fictitious satisfaction; it is an arrest of his desire
that affords him a delicate poise and repose, on tiptoe, so to speak.
[Footnote: Compare Coleridge's statement that poetry is "a more than
usual state of emotion with more than usual order." _Biographia
Literaria_, Vol. II, Chap. I, p. 14, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge.]

Does not the fact that inspiration works in this manner account for the
immemorial connection of poetic creativeness with Bacchic frenzy? To the
aspiring poet wine does not bring his mistress, nor virtue, nor
communion with God, nor any object of his longing. Yet it does bring a
sudden ease to his craving. So, wherever there is a romantic conception
of poetry, one is apt to find inspiration compared to intoxication.

Such an idea did not, of course, find favor among typical eighteenth
century writers. Indeed, they would have seen more reason in ascribing
their clear-witted verse to an ice-pack, than to the bibulous hours
preceding its application to the fevered brow. We must wait for William
Blake before we can