The Fading Coal
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
, A Defence of Poetry (1840)
What Shelley describes here isn’t merely poetic temperament but something any maker recognizes: the strange disproportion between willing and receiving. We cannot summon inspiration through effort any more than we can command the wind. And yet we sit down to work anyway, hoping the coal might catch.
The image of the fading coal is particularly haunting. Inspiration isn’t steady fuel we can stockpile or ration. It flickers into brightness and immediately begins to dim. “When composition begins,” Shelley writes, “inspiration is already on the decline.” The very act of trying to capture a vision starts to diminish it. Every creator knows this particular ache: the gap between the perfection glimpsed and the imperfect thing made.
Now we have tools that can generate text and images with astonishing fluency, available whenever we want them. The inconstant wind seems tamed, the fading coal replaced by something that glows steadily on command. Yet reading Shelley, one wonders whether the inconstancy itself served some purpose we didn’t fully understand. Perhaps the frustration of waiting, the uncertainty of whether anything would come, trained us to recognize the real thing when it arrived. Perhaps the decay shaped what we made.
This isn’t an argument against new capabilities. It’s a question worth sitting with: if creative power has always been something we receive rather than produce, something that visits rather than obeys, what happens when we can generate without waiting? Does the coal still need to fade for the brightness to mean anything?