This is the second book on creativity by Andrew Brink, Professor of English and Associate Member of the Psychiatry Department at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. In his first one, Loss and Symbolic Repair: A Psychological Study of Some English Poets,1 published in 1977, he attributed the creative thrust of such poets as William Cowper, John Donne, John Keats, Sylvia Plath, and Thomas Traherne, each of whom had suffered a significant object loss in childhood, to the need to utilize creative intellectual ability to counter a depressive, ego-weakening rent in their internalized object relations via "symbolic repair."

In this book, Brink still follows the ideas of the British object