Poetic inspiration in early Greece

It is generally agreed that the concept of inspiration is one of the most basic and persistent of Greek notions about poetry. Yet there appears to be a certain confusion on the significance of this observation. For instance, while most scholars consider that the idea is of very great antiquity in Greece, there is a recent tendency to regard the concept as a formulation of the fifth century B.C. E. A. Havelock, for example, describes the notion of poetic inspiration as an invention of fifth century philosophers, and G. S. Kirk states, without discussion, that poetic inspiration was ‘probably quite a new conception’ at the time Euripides was writing. This type of disagreement clearly relates to the more fundamental question of the meaning of the concept of inspiration itself. For although there is an apparent consensus that ancient notions of poetic inspiration correspond in some way to certain modern ideas about the nature of poetic creativity, little attention has been paid to these modern notions of inspiration. And unless such modern notions are investigated, the mere observation that there is a similarity is of little value.