Artistic creativity across the adult life span: An alternative approach

Abstract

The foregoing discussion attempts to present a preliminary exploration of the relationship between selected aspects of creative activity and life span developmental processes. It proposes some degree of synchronism between the maturational needs of the creative individual and both the forms of expression available to the artist through his/her selected artistic idiom and the predominant art ideology (or ideologies) of his/her cultural milieu. I believe this synchronism is necessary for the maintenance of creative effectiveness during certain definable life transitions, such as the approach to midlife, to which I refer in some detail in the discussion of Wordsworth's “Immortality Ode” and, more briefly, in the case of other distinguished Romantic and Victorian authors.