inspiration in a poem, we may take the following remark of B. B. Rogers:
_It is much to be regretted that the phallus element should be so
conspicuous in this play.... (This) coarseness, so repulsive to
ourselves, was introduced, it is impossible to doubt, for the express
purpose of counter-balancing the extreme earnestness and gravity of the
play_. It seems so logical, so irrefutable; and so completely
misinterprets every creative force of Aristophanes' Psyche that it
certainly deserves a little admiration. It is in the best academic
tradition, and everyone respects a man for writing so mendaciously. The
effort of these castrators is always to show that the parts considered
offensive are not the natural expression of the poet, that they are
dictated externally. They argue that Shakespeare's coarseness is the
result of the age and not personal predilection, completely ignoring the
work of men like Sir Philip Sidney and Spenser, indeed practically all
the pre-Shakespearean writers, in whom none of this so-called grossness
exists. Shakespeare wrote sculduddery because he liked it, and for no
other reason; his sensuality is the measure of his vitality. These liars
pretend similarly that because Rabelais had a humanistic reason for much
of his work--the destructior Mediaevalism, and the Church, which purpose
they construe of course as an effort to purify, etc.--therefore he only
put the lewdery to make the rest palatable, when it should be obvious
even to an academic how he glories in his wild humour.

What the academic cannot understand is that in such works, while
attacking certain conditions, the creative power of the vigorous spirits
is so great that it overflows and saturates the intellectual conception
with their own passionate sense of life. It is for this reason that
these works have an eternal significance. If Rabelais were merely a
social reformer, then the value of his work would not have outlived his
generation. If _Lysistrata_ were but a wise political tract, it would