英语阅读练习与讲义

Creative Process of Works

The great question that this paper will, but feebly, attempt to answer is , what is the creative process?

Though much theory has accumulated, little is really known about the power that lies at the bottom of poetic creation. It is true that great poets and artists produce beauty by employing all the powers of personality and by fusing emotions, reason, and intuitions. But what is the magical synthesis that joins and arranges these complex parts into poetic unity?

John s, in his justly famous The Road to Xanadu, developed one of the earliest and still generally acceptable answers to this tantalizing question. Imaginative creation, he concludes, is a complex process in which the conscious and unconscious minds jointly operate. There isthe deep well with its chaos of fortuitously blending images; but there is likewise the Vision which sees shining in and through the chaos of the potential lines of Form, and with the Vision, the controlling Will. Which gives to that potential beauty actuality.

The Deep Well is the unconscious mind that is peopled with the facts, ideas, feelings of the conscious activity. The imaginative vision, an unconscious activity, shines through the land of chaos, of lights and shadows, silently seeking pattern and form. Finally, the conscious mind again, through Will, captures and embodies the idea in the final work of art. In this way is unity born out of chaos.