Timothy Clark's The Theory of Inspiration and Theresa Kelley's Reinventing Allegory return us to an exciting critical landscape that has been sadly neglected lately in studies on the Romantic period. Each has as its basis the wish to reinstate the critical history of poetics as the most interesting way of allowing literary history to intersect with the intellectual concerns of post-modernity. This essay will begin by discussing Clark's work and will then suggest some ways in which his project intersects with Kelley's, an assessment of which will follow. I will end with some thoughts on contemporary Romantic criticism which are, in part, 'inspired' by the heartening reading of these texts. Inspiration has been a neglected term in poetics whose connotations conjure up some of the worst excesses of subjective indulgence. The term suggests many things, the oldest of which, present to Plato, was dictation by an unnamed other. When the discussion turns to the actual practice of writing, however, inspiration can be used to relate notions of inexplicable creative agency to theories of the technique of composition. Embedded within this, certainly, are such 'self-liberating' notions as imagination or poetic madness. Yet theories of inspiration go further than this, and are often the groundwork for an investigation into the theory and practice of composition. Moreover, it is hard to conceive of any poetics that does not embody a theory of composition. One example is particularly illustrative coming, as it does, at a point mid-way between the Romantic period and our own. In an appeal to the late nineteenth-century German world of letters for a new poetics based upon psychology, Wilhelm Dilthey returned to these words in praise of Goethe from his friend, Friedrich Schiller: For Dilthey, Goethe's example presents the critic with an holistic poetic praxis which sails between the Scylla and Charybdis of a rationalist classicism based upon the imposition of figures calculated for effect (these are, for Dilthey, the vestiges of Aristotlianism), and a type of automatic writing like that favoured by Brentano which aims to spurn all that is learned, approaching instead the act of unconscious creation. Schiller's formula fits Dilthey's project rather well. He describes two separate psychological processes which present aspects of a creative and rational mind on an quasi-metaphorical journey inward towards the point of absolute interiority from whence the act of writing proceeds. Furthermore, it is apparent to both Schiller and Dilthey that something of the unique character of Goethe's work derives from the manner of its composition. If Schiller's words can be reduced, with the help of Dilthey's psychology, to the dialectical poetic dictate, "Be rational! Be creative!", then this is a vindication of Goethe's poetic praxis. In order to project the unchanging norms of literary production with a view to explaining literary phenomena as a combination of historical technique and individual creativity, Dilthey returns to an examination of the psychology of the writer at the moment of production, concluding that poetry is more than simply a product of either inspiration or learning. To describe Schiller's formulation as a figure is to point out that it is neither immediately apparent how the act of reflection relates to the moment of creativity, nor is it clear which of these two moments has priority over the other. We may well ask whether his analysis is a critical fiction which replaces, by generalisation, the specific act of historical reconstruction necessary for an investigation of the moment of composition. In what, though, would such an historical reconstruction consist? It is significant that both he and Dilthey see the manner of composition as central to an understanding of …