Artspire

He or she would be transported beyond his own mind and given the gods' or goddesses own thoughts to embody. the invocations of the muses and the various poetic gods (Apollo and Dionysus, in particular) are the inspired breaths of the god. Artistic inspiration is a bestowed gift of the gods.

Inspiration is prior to consciousness and outside of skill (ingenium in Latin). Technique and performance are independent of inspiration, and therefore it is possible for the non-poet to be inspired and for a poet or painter's skill to be insufficient to the inspiration. In Hebrew poetics, inspiration is similarly a divine matter. In the Book of Amos, 3:8 the prophet speaks of being overwhelmed by God's voice and compelled to speak. However, inspiration is also a matter of revelation for the prophets, and the two concepts are intermixed to some degree. Revelation is a conscious process, where the writer or painter is aware and interactive with the vision, while inspiration is involuntary and received without any complete understanding.

In Christianity, inspiration is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Saint Paul said that all of the Bible is inspired by God (2 Timothy) and the account of Pentecost records the Holy Spirit descending with the sound of a mighty wind. This understanding of "inspiration" is vital for those who maintain Biblical literalism, for the authors of the scriptures would, if possessed by the voice of God, not "filter" or interpose their personal visions onto the text. For church fathers like Saint Jerome, David was the perfect poet, for he best negotiated between the divine impulse and the human consciousness.

Modern inspiration

Carl Gustav Jung's Carl Gustav Jung theory of inspiration focused on the other side of the Romantic notion of inspiration by suggesting that an artist is one who was attuned to something impersonal, something outside of the individual experience: collective memory.

Jung's artist is the one best able to feel and express the conflict between the "shadow" primitive and the civilized ego and to encode the archetypes archetypes of the human mind. Thus, again, inspiration came from a kind of genius, as these memories were present in all persons (thereby accounting for recognition of the archetypes and memories when viewing artwork), but only the artistic genius could get inspiration/memory. Those artists who followed Jung's thought put an emphasis on primitivism and the study of pre-literate art and myth.