Timothy Clark. The Theory of Inspiration: Composition As a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Book Review‪)‬

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. 312. $24.95 paper. In the prevailing critical climate, the psychic processes that go into the making of a literary work are usually thought to be irrelevant to its appreciation. In particular, claims about inspiration tend to he dismissed as the residue of a wishfully deluded view of just another mode of cultural production. Yet this sort of vigilance towards idealization can easily take on dogmatic rigidity. According to Timothy Clark, the reluctance to take the concept of inspiration seriously has created a lacuna in scholarship. Clark insists that authors' testimonies about inspiration, while not to be taken at face value, nonetheless reveal a great deal about changing conceptions of literature. What is at stake in Clark's erudite book, however, is not only the historical importance but, equally importantly, the philosophical validity of the category of inspiration. Authors from Plato to Pessoa have invoked a dictating voice or a breath of spirit in such varied and compelling terms as to suggest a core of phenomenological troth underlying these tropes.