...against willing oneself to write a poem. As he argues, using imagery redolent of Platonic discourse, "the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some...inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness" (503-4). The speaker's "Ashes and sparks" may sputter toward extinction, as well as toward dematerialization,...

...frigates, seventy-eight stairs, and so on. 76 An allusion to Shelley's remark about the creative process: “A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry.' The...inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (A Defence of Poetry, in The Critical Tradition, 2nd ed., ed. David Richter (Boston: Bedford Books,...

...refers to "the magnificent image which Joyce quotes somewhere in Ulysses ('the mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightnessy.8 Eliot is using the reference to Shelley to illustrate his point that "Shelley's finest...

...regarded as just "a fading coal" as shown in the extract below: A man cannot say, "I will compose a poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it: for...influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness...but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious...

...fingers laughingly through it, an unsteady flush was playing triumphantly over her complexion, Shelley's 'fading coal, which some invisible influence, like...inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness'. We sat for perhaps a couple of minutes, blowing, rubbing, hugging and slapping heat back into our bodies....

...soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry/' The greatest...the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some 62 invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises...

...art" (Shelley, 1901, p. 381, "To a skylark," line 5) and wrote: "Poetry is not like reasoning . . . this power arises from within, like the colour of...flower which fades and changes as it is developed" (Shelley, 1965, pp. 70-71). The Romantics were revolutionary; they valued the artist's imagination...

...so intensely. "The mind in creation is as a fading coal," Shelley would write in Defence of Poetry, "which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness." "If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree," Keats proclaimed, "it had better not come...

...cause." But the poet himself is only a medium. He is not the final cause, which is a spiritual mystery: "for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which...inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness." This "invisible influence," wherever it comes from (the reader may be recalling Isaiah 6:6-7), stands behind...