Daily Inspiration Quote by Lionel Trilling

Trilling draws a bright, almost clinical line between art as mastery and symptom as captivity. The poet, in his formulation, isn’t someone who merely has a vivid inner life; he’s someone who can steer it. Fantasy becomes material, not master: shaped, edited, disciplined into form. That word "command" matters. It implies technique, choice, and a distance from one’s own desire - the capacity to stand slightly outside the self and arrange it.

Then Trilling pivots to the neurotic, and the grammar flips. The neurotic is "possessed", a term that drags in exorcism and helplessness. Fantasy here isn’t imagination’s playground; it’s compulsion, replay, fixation. The subtext is a defense of art against a rising mid-century temptation to reduce creativity to pathology. Trilling, writing in an era when psychoanalytic language was becoming a cultural lingua franca, refuses the easy romance that the artist is simply the sick person with better publicity.

There’s also a quiet moral argument underneath the aesthetic one. To "command" fantasy is to accept responsibility for what you make of your inner life; to be "possessed" is to be exempted by diagnosis. Trilling doesn’t deny that poets have neuroses. He insists the distinction lies in agency: the artist converts private obsession into public meaning, while the neurotic remains trapped in private theater. It’s a sharp rebuke to the cult of unfiltered self-expression - and a reminder that craft is not repression but a form of freedom.