Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

Anthony Hecht is a lyric poet whose verse has been published in numerous collections and in The New Yorker and other leading magazines. He has been awarded fellowships by all the major foundations and has won a great number of prizes for his work, including the Pulitzer in 1968. Hecht’s poems are crystalline, elegant to the point of refinement, constructed with a rigorous attention to form. A Vivaldi concerto could provide a passable musical analogy to his writing. He often uses the sonnet, or even earlier canzoni of the kind used in the Middle Ages, more than six hundred years ago. The rules of these forms are so rigid that even Dante complained that to write according to them was like hanging chains upon himself and that he never would write in that style again. Yet, paradoxically, it is by following such demanding discipline that poetry can liberate the writer—and the reader—from the jumbled onslaught of raw experience.