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I have read Dr. Otto Rank's Art and Artist, not so much as a critic might but as an artist must—with deep gratitude to the author for stating so acutely and recognizing so sympathetically many little-understood problems and aspects of the artist's life and work; but nevertheless with deep disappointment at finding these recognitions and statements forced into an artificial philosophic system which appears to me to be largely an elaborate denial of sexuality to art, and, beyond that, a glorification of the human will as responsible for everything good in human life.
To Dr. Rank the individual will is the source of art, manifesting itself negatively as the controller of the sexual impulses and positively as the urge to create. "This creator-impulse is not, therefore, sexuality, as Freud assumed, but expresses the anti-sexual tendency in human beings." Again and again in these pages, Dr. Rank denies the possibility of sexuality being sublimated into art-creation. And I, reading these pages, pause to reflect upon my own art-products—poems, novels and plays—asking myself what was their motivating force, whether it was my individual creative will, or repressed sexual impulses demanding relief in sublimated expression. Passing over some lyrical outbursts of thwarted love, as being too pat examples of sublimated sexuality to afford a fair test, I come in my reflections to a short poem which I wrote at the age of twenty-one, after leaving home to work in a large city:
I wish had my father here,And we'd send out for a pail of beer.A loaf of good rye bread we'd get,