From Inspiration to Imagination: The Physiology of Poetry in Early Modernity

From the classical theory of divine inspiration as the explanation of how poetry is composed, to the widespread emphasis upon the work of the imagination in the production of literature within Romanticism, the inner sense of the imagination appears in the discourse of physicians and natural philosophers of the early modern period as ultimately responsible for the writing of poetry. The imaginative faculty, together with the humour of melancholy (at the time, simultaneously classified as a disease), are key in the works that ponder the physiological origins of poetry and the mental structure that makes the mind of the poet distinctive.