So we are back to these questions Elisa New posed in the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is pretty short: is creating poems “largely” interior?

Is anything “largely” interior?

It sure feels that way. But I would argue it really isn’t. I would argue it’s impossibly interior and “largely” exterior. By design or accident.

I keep coming back to this quote , “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.”

This quote is often misattributed to the French leader Charles De Gaulle but in fact it originated from the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis from “Greek poet’s odyssey”, 17 Jan 1964, LIFE Magazine, ‎Vol. 56, No. 3, Page 75 (according to Wikiquote).

We are so full of influences, how would we even know where ideas are coming from. That’s why it’s so easily believable to be divine inspiration.  You could say maybe the synthesis is largely an interior process. But the edges of that are even fuzzy.

Where do we end and the rest of it begin?

Of course, I’m writing on the other side of the narcissistic outcome of a 2024 U.S. election, so I can see how this idea will lose traction soon, as it is losing ground even as we speak. More self-centered ideas of supreme authorship will come back into popularity, I predict. Actual studies about how the brain works during creativity and the human psychology of knowledge will become suppressed as there seems to be a new surge in locating one’s particular life experience as the center of the universe.

A lifetime of ads telling us we deserve it “our way” has come to envelop belief systems now. Good times.

But I’m asking myself these questions so…yeah.

That awesome print above by Loreillustration can be purchased in various formats on Etsy.