The Creative Spark



You’ve often heard it said,
in bold Socratic dialogue;
Plato’s Republic notwithstanding,
proverbially announced:

“Necessity is the mother
of invention.”
Nay, I declare,
proverbially and aphoristically:

“Creativity is the mother
of invention.
Once the creativity
is there,

the necessity,
by sheer necessity;
of the creative spark,
will, indubitably, arise.”

About this poem

This poem was written in 1960, when the poet was a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C. A thoughtful mercurial introvert, he thrived more within the inner world of dreams and fantasies, than on earthly barren plains, the habitat , it seemed to him, of grounded learned folk. As a poet of the inner transitory world, a dweller of forbidden realms, his observation is that ever incubating in the collective psyche of the world, is Imagination, triggered by the impulse of archetypal energies, raw and primitive as the honeycomb of forest bees that, when harvested, surfaces from her native residence, from hidden chthonic places and, upon awakening from her latent sleep, like the immortal phoenix’s rising, manifests herself to outer world, transmogrified, now glorified with the eponymous name, Necessity. This poem, The Creative Spark, is borne out of that perspective, the psychological perspective depicting movement from the latent to the manifest, from the primary to the secondary. 

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Written on May 09, 1960

Submitted by karlcfolkes on September 27, 2021

Modified by karlcfolkes on November 05, 2022

19 sec read
234

Quick analysis:

Scheme xxxx aBcx aBdc ddxx
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 373
Words 66
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4

Karl Constantine FOLKES

Retired educator of Jamaican ancestry with a lifelong interest in composing poetry dealing particularly with the metaphysics of self-reflection; completed a dissertation in Children’s Literature in 1991 at New York University entitled: An Analysis of Wilhelm Grimm’s “Dear Mili” Employing Von Franzian Methodological Processes of Analytical Psychology. The subject of the dissertation concerned the process of Individuation. more…

All Karl Constantine FOLKES poems | Karl Constantine FOLKES Books

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    "The Creative Spark" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Mar. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/110686/the-creative-spark>.

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