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27 - The psychology of literary creation and literary response

from LITERATURE AND OTHER DISCIPLINES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
James Sambrook
Edited by
H. B. Nisbet  and
Claude Rawson
H. B. Nisbet
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Claude Rawson
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

The psychology of literary creation is clearly, concisely, and sturdily summarized in Thomas Hobbes's Answer to Davenant's Preface to Gondibert (1650):

Time and Education begets experience; Experience begets memory; Memory begets Judgment and Fancy: Judgment begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a Poem … Judgment, the severer Sister, busieth her self in a grave and rigid examination of all the parts of Nature … registring … their order, causes, uses, differences, and resemblances; Whereby the Fancy, when any work of Art is to be performed, findes her materials at hand and prepared for use … So that when she seemeth to fly from one Indies to the other, and from Heaven to Earth, and to penetrate into the hardest matter and obscurest places, into the future and into her self, and all this in a point of time, the voyage is not very great, her self being all she seeks; and her wonderful celerity consisteth not so much in motion as in copious Imagery discreetly ordered and perfectly registered in the memory.

(Spingarn, Critical Essays, II, pp. 59–60)

The images in the memory upon which judgement and fancy work are decaying sense-impressions retained in the mind after the object producing them is removed. Images run naturally into sequences within the mind, according to the contiguity in time and space of those sense-impressions of which they are the decaying residue. Such sequences, ‘the train of imagination’ or ‘train of thought’, may be unguided, as in dreams, or guided by the will, ‘as one would sweep a room, to find a jewel; or as a spaniel ranges the field, till he finds a scent’ (Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 22).

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The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 614 - 632
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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