Inclining the Mind Toward “Sudden Illumination”: French Polymath Henri Poincaré on How Creativity Works

And yet, it’s not rest alone that made the idea arrive, but the oscillation of effort and rest. Poincaré continues:

These sudden inspirations...never happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray. These efforts have not be

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Scientists and artists have shared the experience that their most creative achievements, or most profound insights into the nature of the universe, came after letting go of mental hard work and allowing some deeper wisdom or vision to come through them. Having touched into a deeper reality where a mathematical truth, a beautiful painting, or an exq

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The first of these phases, preparation, is partly conscious and partly unconscious, partly willed and partly serendipitous, and may go on for years. It is generally associated with some pretty hard work, acquiring skills and knowledge, thinking consciously and mulling things over unconsciously, so as to prepare the fertile ground in which the seed

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At the opening of Book XII of his greatest work, The Prelude, subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind, Wordsworth describes how inspiration requires both the effort by which the mind ‘aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves’ and the stillness of the mind which ‘fits [the poet] to receive it, when unsought’. An effort must be made at first, but, despit

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