aeolian harp

I was thinking about my somewhat failed attempt to describe the creative process today in class, and I suddenly remembered a text that I had read last semester: Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry. In this essay, Shelley likens creativity to a wind, and the artist to an Aeolian harp - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolian_harp. The significance of this metaphor is that, like the wind, creativity is not subject to the will of the artist. Rather, a creative idea occurs to us suddenly and without warning. We, as artists, rely on this creative impulse to produce art, but the creative impulse itself is something over which we have no control .

On second thought, this summary is pretty superficial. I think I wrote a paper about this - I'll post it when i find it.