Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 73, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 March 1914 — CREATOR NEVER OWN MASTER [ARTICLE]

CREATOR NEVER OWN MASTER

Yields to Inspiration, But Rarely Is Certain What Form His Completed Work Will Take.

The creative impulse does not Itself know the next step It will take, or the next form that will arise, any more than the creative artist determines beforehand all the thoughts and forms his inventive genius -will bring forth. He has the impulse or the inspiration to do a certain thing, to let himself go in a certain direction, but just the precise form his creation will take is as w unknown to him as to you and me. Some stubbornness or obduracy In his material, or some accident of time or place, may make it quite different from what he had hoped or vaguely planned. He does not know what thought or Incident or character he is looking for till he has found it, till it has risen above his mental horizon. So far as he is inspired, so far as be is spontaneous, just so far is the world with which he deals plastic and fluid and indeterminate and ready to take any form his medium of expression—words, colors, tones —affords him. He may surprise himself, excel himself; he has surrendered himself to a power beyond the control of his will or knowledge.—John Burroughs, In the Atlantic.