The Symbolic World — Kathleen Goldblatt Poetry

“Trust that which gives you meaning, accept it as your guide.

– Carl Jung

Poetry utilizes metaphor and symbolism and it’s difficult to think about making poetry without a sense of the imaginal and symbolic worlds. Carl Jung, the founder of Analytical Psychology, wrote about this extensively:
“Every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination and have their source in what one is pleased to call … fantasy. Not the artist alone, but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy.”

(Jung CW 1921: par. 93)
“A symbol remains a perpetual challenge to our thoughts and feelings. That probably explains why a symbolic work is so stimulating, why it grips us so intensely …”

(Jung CW15, para 119)
A symbol stands for something outside itself pointing the way to a new, larger idea or image.
“Symbolic thinking is the ability to think about things that are not rationally present in an imaginative, enigmatic and magical way...”

– Nora Swan-Foster, Jungian analyst, author of Jungian Art Therapy: A guide to dreams,
images, and analytical psychology

On Creativity

In Jungian analyst Linda Schierse Leonard’s book, The Call to Create: Celebrating acts of imagination, she posits the “call to create as key to being human.”

“The definition of the word create is to “originate, to cause to exist, to bring about, to produce, and to form by artistic effort.”“

“… creativity is an adventure of the soul in its quest for meaning in this earthly life and all of us are called to create in different ways.“

““Finding heart and passion within oneself is at the core of creative life and bids us to develop the courage to be compassionate with ourselves and others as we create.”“

“Most good poems hold some part of their thoughts in invisible ink. Such words … need not be exposed to be perceived. The unexpressed can at times affect the reader more strongly than what is explicit, precisely because it has not been narrowed by conscious accounting.”

— Jane Hirschfield

Poetry utilizes metaphor and symbolism and it’s difficult to think about making poetry without a sense of the imaginal and symbolic worlds. Carl Jung, the founder of Analytical Psychology, wrote about this extensively:

“Every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination and have their source in what one is pleased to call … fantasy. Not the artist alone, but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy.”

“A symbol remains a perpetual challenge to our thoughts and feelings. That probably explains why a symbolic work is so stimulating, why it grips us so intensely …”

A symbol stands for something outside itself pointing the way to a new, larger idea or image.

“Symbolic thinking is the ability to think about things that are not rationally present in an imaginative, enigmatic and magical way...”

On Creativity

In Jungian analyst Linda Schierse Leonard’s book, The Call to Create: Celebrating acts of imagination, she posits the “call to create as key to being human.”

“Most good poems hold some part of their thoughts in invisible ink. Such words … need not be exposed to be perceived. The unexpressed can at times affect the reader more strongly than what is explicit, precisely because it has not been narrowed by conscious accounting.”