The Poem of Stephen Spender
The mind of creative individuals works in inscrutable ways. Time and again they have reported how they received inspiration for their work in odd moments, when they were least expecting them.
Poet Stephen Spender described how the inspiration for one of his poems came to him while he was travelling through a coal-mining area in a train. While passing through this "landscape of pits and pitheads, artificial mountains, jagged yellow wounds in the earth" a line flashed through his mind - "A language of flesh and roses" - underlying which was a sequence of complicated thought. In fact, it took him much analysis and introspection to understand the roots of his inspiration, which provided "the answer before the question". He wrote:
"The sequence of my thoughts was as follows: the industrial landscape which seems by now a routine... is actually the expression of man's will... a symbol of modern man's mind. In other words, the world which we create - the world of slums and telegrams and newspaper - is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts. Although this is so, it is obviously a language which has gone out of our control. It is a confused language, the irresponsible senile gibberish... I started thinking that if the phenomena created by humanity are really like the words in a language, what kind of language do we aspire to? All this sequence of thought flashed into my mind with the answer which came before the question: A language of flesh and roses."
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