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Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. Operating within its own realm, it makes its constructs of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals.
The function of music [and of any art] is not stimulation of feeling, but expression of it; and furthermore, not the symptomatic expression of feelings that beset the composer [artist] but a symbolic expression of the forms of sentience as he understands them.
In the last year of his life, in a poem entitled The circus animals' sesertion, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats reflected on a crisis in his creative work when inspiration had failed him for a considerable period (Yeats, 1994). Crises of this sort are not confined to poets or to old age, however, but assail creative artists of whatever kind in any phase of their development. In this paper, I want to explore such creative lapses, consider their meaning in the artist's psychic economy, and in this way open up issues of more general relevance for creativity.
Yeats begins his poem with a statement that any creative person would surely recognise:
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,I sought it daily for six weeks or so.