Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal, you are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today my guest is Edward Hirsch, the author most recently of The Demon and the Angel,

searching for the source of artistic inspiration.

Edward Hirsch is a poet whose most recent books include On Love, Earthly Measures,

The Night Parade.

He teaches at the University of Houston, and this is a book about inspiration,

but in particular the dark inspiration that Garcia Lorca talked about when he talked about something called Duende.

Now, what is Duende?

Well, Duende is a Spanish word. We don't have a word for it in English.

All over Spain and Latin America, if you refer to the Duende, it means something like an imp or a sprite or the Yiddish dibuk.

A little troublesome imp who causes trouble, stirs up trouble, steals your keys, does little sort of wicked things.

But in Andalusia, where Lorca was from, Duende was used in a different way as a sort of idea of dark inspiration, artistic inspiration.

So in Andalusia, they'd say a flamenco dancer has duende, or a singer, has duende, which is some kind of possession, some kind of sense of being taken over by some dark force.

Now you say that when you were young, you were reading poetry and as you read 18th century

poetry, with the exception of Christopher Smart and some sections of Pope's version of the Iliad,

that you weren't finding the insanity, the inspired poetry

that you most sought, and that it took really romanticism to bring that.

Now, that is conventionally regarded as the place where the self entered the poem significantly.

In other words, that ego generated these poems.

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