PEOPLE are always enquiring how exactly poets get their “inspiration,” perhaps in the hope that it may happen to themselves one day and that if they know the signs in advance, something profitable may come of it.

It is a difficult conundrum, but I should answer somehow like this:—The poet is consciously or unconsciously always either taking in or giving out; he hears, observes, weighs, guesses, condenses, idealizes, and the new ideas troop quietly into his mind until suddenly every now and again two of them violently quarrel and drag into the fight a group of other ideas that have been loitering about at the back of his mind for years; there is great excitement, noise and bloodshed, with finally a reconciliation and drinks all round. The poet writes a tactful police report on the affair and there is the poem.

Or, to put it in a more sober form:—

When conflicting issues disturb his mind, which in its conscious state is unable to reconcile them logically, the poet acquires the habit of self-hypnotism, as practised by the witch doctors, his ancestors in poetry.

He learns in self-protection to take pen and paper and let the pen solve the hitherto insoluble problem which has caused the disturbance.

I speak of this process of composition as self-hypnotism because on being interrupted the poet experiences the disagreeable sensations of a sleep-walker disturbed, and later finds it impossible to remember how the early drafts of a poem ran, though he may recall every word of a version which finally satisfied his conscious scrutiny. Confronted afterwards with the very first draft of the series he cannot in many cases decipher his own writing, far less recollect the process of thought which made him erase this word and substitute that. Many poets of my acquaintance have corroborated what I have just said and also observed that on laying down their pens after the first excitement of composition they feel the same sort of surprise that a man finds on waking from a “fugue,” they discover that they have done a piece of work of which they never suspected they were capable; but at the same moment they discover a number of trifling surface defects which were invisible before.