Exploring the Lyrical

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

La danse I 1909 (PD US) Henri Matisse

“. . . everybody who has ever done creative work of any kind knows this moment. You make your plans in terms of what the mind can think of, and if you hold to those plans you’re going to have a dry, dead piece of work. What you have to do is open out underneath into chaos, and then a new thing comes, and if you bring your critical faculty down too early, you’re going to kill it.

There’s a beautiful letter that Schiller wrote to a young author who was having the trouble that’s known as writer’s block. This young writer had oh, so much to say, but he couldn’t write. This is a normal situation. Schiller said simply, ‘Your problem is that you’re bringing the critical factor into play before you have let the lyric factor work.”
- Joseph Campbell

Artists are explorers. The “terra incognita” which artists explore may be a world of ideas or a world of feeling. S…