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This contribution to the psycho-analytical study of poetry was suggested in part by some recent discussions in the British Psycho-Analytical Society of the sublimation of libidinal trends in speech, music, and reading and by the consequent reflection that the unconscious must influence the form of literary creations as well as their content, and that in every detail. The sonnet was selected for investigation because it includes the elements of poetical form—rhythm and metre, rhyme and stanza—somewhat as genital organization comprises the primitive component-instincts, uniting them into a whole apparently dominated by the complex which has been found to be crucial for instinctual development.
The structure of the sonnet, its so-called laws, the attitude of poets and critics toward it and the themes it has been most frequently employed to express, all indicate that the sonnet is not only particularly well-adapted for the sublimation of the Oedipus complex and the mingled desire and dread with which the first love-object is regarded, but that they have all been to a considerable extent determined by the unconscious needs to which the sonnet gives disguised expression and satisfaction. The present study is necessarily limited to the influence of the higher libidinal trends but it is hoped that as the sublimation of pregenital trends in speech and writing is more fully studied, the subject can be pursued into the deeper levels of the unconscious.
The evidence here presented is largely given in the words of poets and critics, who of course cannot be suspected of intentional double meaning. But, like patients in analysis, they often disclose the unconscious meaning of the subject they are discussing on the conscious level.
Only the general and broadly typical significance of the form is here considered, without regard to the particular unconscious psychic patterns of the persons who have employed it as a mode of sublimation, though no doubt a study of individuals would str