Many creators, beginning with Socrates, have spoken of a daemon who forbids them or, on the contrary, commands them to do this or that. Daniel Andreev thought that behind every creator on earth there is a daemon. Kipling said of writers: ‘We are only telephone wires’.  and added: ‘My Daemon was with me in the Jungle Books, Kim, and both Puck books, and good care I took to walk delicately, lest he should withdraw… When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, obey’ .

What did all these people mean? The modern mind is alien to the idea of a bodiless being who gives advice and directs actions, such a being he can not imagine — which is, we should add, strange, because the mind itself, if you think about it, is bodiless and only mysteriously connected with matter… But times are changing, and modern people are more inclined to talk about inspiration than about daemons.

When we hear of creativity, we think of inspiration, and not without reason. However, the connexion between the two is not direct, not necessary, and before we talk about it, we need to break it, at least in the reader’s mind. Certainly, creativity may be inspired; but it may also be based on labour and effort; and it may be (and most often is) a combination of the fruits of inspiration with the fruits of labour and effort.

We call him in whose work inspiration prevails a poet, even if he does not write poetry. Admiring this mysterious inspiration, we are not deceived, but we neglect the other side of truly inspired creativity: labour, labour and labour.

Labour, first and foremost, on ourselves. Labour on poems (let us assume that we are talking about a poet) is necessary; but even before that the poet needs to educate himself as a person. If at the beginning he is led by his imagination, and is led by ‘the sweet passion of lofty thoughts and verses’, then later ‘lofty thoughts’ take (or rather — should take) the upper hand over what Pushkin conventionally called ‘sweet passion’. As Dante said: ‘poetry is first of all thought’.

The artist must not just ‘develop’ his mind, but educate it comprehensively. Taste, measure, sense of beauty he is as necessary as the ability to think. After all, inspiration does not bring us its own sense of beauty, but uses what it finds.

It is often thought that inspiration is some kind of divine dictation, in which the poet is given the role of Balaam’s ass (who, as we know, spoke, but in someone else’s words).

This notion is far from the truth. It is true that something speaks to the poet experiencing inspiration that he does not find in the composition of his personality as far as we can know it. But that is still half the truth. The main point is that before this conversation is possible, the poet must refine and educate his mind. Inspiration is not dictation; it is not ‘revelation’; it has no power to inform us of things we did not know before; it can only order things we know in a new, unprecedented way. Again I say: inspiration brings us nothing ready-made, but uses what it finds. We cannot learn intelligence or beauty from inspiration, but it can use our intelligence and sense of beauty to express truths about known things unknown to us before.

Moreover: inspiration has no language of its own; not in the sense that it is silent, but in the sense that it is above, on the other side, beyond language, and uses the language developed by the writer as a handy tool. A possible and, no doubt, frequent case: a writer whose inspiration is greater than the capacity of expression he has developed. In this case we see the beginnings; the signs of something more; a swing that does not reach its target. In a sense, this is what happened to Gogol when he stepped outside of literature, and stepped into nowhere, into the narrow and utterly unsuitable for his new talent forms of Correspondence with Friends.

We should distinguish between inspiration-gift and inspiration-ability. Inspiration as a gift ‘bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’. Inspiration as an ability partly depends on us, although we cannot say ‘on our efforts’. One would like to say that this connection is inverse, and the more effort we make to evoke it, the less we achieve. The name passive or ‘negative’ ability would suit it best. Why? Because the inner life of the artist is more silence than speech; more waiting than action. To reach the source of creativity at will is beyond our power. We have only small tricks that help, but not always: solitude, concentration, removal from the crowd and its games…

The law of creativity: we can’t write anything ‘of our own free will’. No, Kipling is not right when he says ‘We are only telephon wires’, but nevertheless: we cannot take up writing only because we want to say, like Chekhov’s hero, ‘A few words in defence of freedom of the press’. Thoughts must come to us, and we have no power to attract them (except for a few weak but still effective techniques like inner silence, concentration, and solitude, mentioned above).

Hence comes the humility of the poet, a little-known, but peculiar to anyone who has moved from ‘the sweet passion of high thoughts and verses’, from the trial of strength and play to effective communication with inspiration. The humility of the poet is not in that conscientious belief in his own nothingness which some people are so fond of, but in the good-natured recognition of his own smallness compared with the power that speaks to him. The more a poet thinks of such a thing as ‘talent’, the farther he is from understanding the Gift, which is given at will and which not everyone knows how to accept, and worse, which the poet himself is not given every day of his life, and never at will. The poet depends on a little, but very important: to refine his mind, to sharpen his pen, to exercise in understanding difficult speeches, in a good ear… Without this good ear there will be no real creativity, but only labour and effort, which some impress, but nothing lasting (read: standing in a unique relationship with God and the world) can not create.

After all, poetry is what puts one in a unique relationship with the world. There may be two similar rhymists, but there are no two similar poets. Creativity is personal, even if it speaks of things that are commonly known and universally accepted. Creativity communicates reality to us, refracted by a layer of unique soul life. Where there is no such uniqueness, there is no poetry (remembering our constant reservation that poetry is the generic name for all art), but only a combination of words.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity. Essays on Cullture.

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