The Working of an Unconscious Wish in the Creation of Poetry and Drama1

This is an humble attempt at studying the poetry and drama of Rabindranath Tagore, the greatest poet of India of the present century.

Freud was the first to show that an unfulfilled wish repressed in the unconscious is at the root of artistic creation. Rabindranath, too, senses the existence of the unconscious in some of his poetical expressions. In his poem Chhabi (The Picture) we find:

Am I oblivious of you? well, I am;—but it is not forgetting you: Seated in the heart of oblivion you have thrilled the blood of my life in its career of throbbing ebb and pulsing flow.

Or, in his Bidaya-Abhisap (The Farewell Curse):

Yet, look again, and diving down to the inmost depth of your heart, —pry;

And see if there be not a wish lying hid, like the budding blade of a kusa grass not the less sharp for its tiny insignificance!

What the poet saw in his imagination, science has probed and proved. We may assume that behind the versatile achievements of the artistic genius of Tagore, an unconscious repressed wish is at wort. It will be out of place here to enter into a detailed exposition of theory. Suffice it to say that mainly sexual wishes are repressed in the unconscious, for it is generally a sexual wish that has its opposite counterpart realizable in life; wishes that are not of a sexual nature do not suffer the same lot. Many psychologists may not agree with this view, but there will be unanimity on one point, viz. that nine out of ten wishes in the unconscious are definitely sexual.

Just as in dreams, the heroes and heroines of a poem or a dramatic work are so many symbols. Just as a myth is a dream dreamt by a race, a poem or a drama is a dream dreamt by the poet. The forms of beauty created by mythology are like the huge reptiles of an antediluvian age—showing in their parts an utter lack of proportion. Besides, one must not lose sight of the fact that in olden times the repression of the sexual wish was less imperative and less rigid, and