communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that
it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the
revelation is given to him,--ancient and modern writers alike describe
the experience thus. And modern poets, no less than ancient ones, feel
that, before becoming the channel of world meaning, they must be
deprived of their own petty, egocentric thoughts. So Keats avers of the
singer,

One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall;
The next he writes his soul's memorial.
[Footnote: _A Visit to Burns' Country_.]

So Shelley describes the experience:

Meaning on his vacant mind
Flashed like strong inspiration.
[Footnote: _Alastor_.]

The poet is not, he himself avers, merely thinking about things. He
becomes one with them. In this sense all poets are pantheists, and the
flash of their inspiration means the death of their personal thought,
enabling them, like Lucy, to be

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.

Hence the singer has always been called a madman. The modern writer
cannot escape Plato's conclusion,

There is no invention in him (the poet) until he has been