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furor poeticus

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Poetic frenzy; the divine madness or inspired state in which a poet creates.

Detailed Definition
Furor poeticus describes the state of divine inspiration in which the poet is seized by a creative force beyond rational control. Related to Plato's concept of divine madness in the Ion and Phaedrus, it was adopted by Latin poets to describe the moment of creative ecstasy when the Muse takes possession of the poet. In verse, it justifies the irregular, the visionary, and the transgressive in poetry, asserting that the highest creativity comes not from craft alone but from surrender to an overwhelming inspirational force.
Example
Example in poetry:
Plato's Ion, in which Socrates argues that poets speak not from knowledge but from divine madness, is the philosophical source of furor poeticus; and the tradition it generated pervades Western discussions of poetic inspiration; Marlowe's Tamburlaine speaks in a furor poeticus that is deliberately confused with the hero's own world-conquering ambition — the extraordinary language enacting the frenzy it describes; Keats's description of writing "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "Ode to a Nightingale" in states of intense, barely conscious absorption is a Romantic account of furor poeticus; A student might reflect on their own experience of composition — whether they have ever experienced something like furor poeticus, and how it differs from the calculated, craft-driven mode of writing; The Surrealists' automatic writing experiments were a twentieth-century attempt to technologize furor poeticus — to induce the state of inspired unreason through method rather than waiting for divine seizure
Additional Notes
Furor poeticus is related to Plato's concept of divine madness (theia mania) in the Ion and Phaedrus, where Socrates argues that poets do not compose by skill (techne) but by divine inspiration — they are the mouthpieces of the gods, seized by a madness that bypasses reason. Students should note the tension between furor poeticus and the rationalist tradition of poetics represented by Aristotle's Poetics and Horace's Ars Poetica, both of which emphasize skill, craft, and rational judgment. This tension — inspiration versus craft, furor versus ars — is one of the most generative in the entire poetic tradition, and it is never fully resolved: the best poetry appears to require both. Related terms include the Muse (the divine source of inspiration), afflatus (divine breath, inspiration), enthusiasmos (the Greek equivalent of furor poeticus, literally being possessed by a god), and the concept of negative capability (Keats's term for the capacity to receive inspiration without anxiously resolving it into rational statement).
Also Known As
poetic frenzy divine madness poetic madness poetic inspiration furor divinus
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