theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and Psychology 79
against simplification, he remarks that some writers reveal their
type in their creative work, while others reveal their anti-type,
their complement. 7
Homo scriftor, it should be conceded, is not a single type. If
we devise a romantic blend of Coleridge, Shelley, Baudelaire,
and Poe, we must presently remember Racine, Milton, and
Goethe, or Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. We may begin
by differentiating lyric poets, and Romantic poets, from dra-
matic and epic poets and their partial equivalents, the novelists.
One of the German typologists, Kretschmer, separates the poets
(who are leptosomatic and incline to schizophrenia) from the
novelists (who are pyknic of physical structure and manic-
depressive or "cycloid" of temperament). There is certainly a
typological pair of the "possessed," i.e., the automatic or obses-
sive or prophetic poet, and the "maker," the writer who is pri-
marily a trained, skillful, responsible craftsman. This distinction
seems partly historical: the "possessed" is the primitive poet,
the shaman j then the Romantic, the Expressionist, the Surreal-
ist, we say. The professional poets, trained in the bardic schools
of Ireland and Iceland, the poets of the Renaissance and neo-
classicism, are "makers." But of course these types must be
understood as not mutually exclusive but polar ; and in the instances
of great writers—including Milton, Poe, James, and
Eliot as well as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky—we have to think
of the writer as both "maker" and "possessed," as combining
an obsessively held vision of life with a conscious, precise care
for the presentation of that vision. 8
Perhaps the most influential of modern polarities is Nietzsche's
in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), that between Apollo and
Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, and the two kinds
and processes of art which they represent: the arts of sculpture
and of music j the psychological states of the dream and of
ecstatic inebriation. These correspond approximately to the clas-
sical "maker" and the romantic "possessed" (or foeta vates).
Though he does not avow it, the French psychologist Ribot
must owe to Nietzsche the basis for his own division of literary
artists between the two chief types of imagination. The former
of these, the "plastic," characterizes the sharp visualizer who is
primarily incited by observation of the outside world, by per-