Inspiration is a basic concept of western poetics, and deserves reassessment with all the tools of modern literary theory. Timothy Clark's book is an entirely original and unprecedented project, which throws up surprising readings of the theory of inspiration in western poetics since the enlightment: the place, for instance, of mass 'enthusiasms' or crowd psychology in romantic conceptions of inspirations; H.D's transvaluation of romantic aesthetics in Notes on thought and vision; and the decisive place of surrealism in the emergence of anti-humanist notions of inspiration as a 'limit-experience' crucial to the poetics of Blanchot, Celan and Derrida. Though often now omitted from dictionaries of literary terms, Timothy Clark has reasserted the position of literary inspiration.