Seeking inspiration

Martin Martin describes the traditional method of seeking inspiration used by the poets of the Western Islands of Scotland in the seventeenth century:

I must not omit to relate their way of study, which is very singular: they shut their doors and windows for a day’s time, and lie on their backs, with a stone upon their belly, and plaids about their heads, and their eyes being covered, they pump their brains for rhetorical encomium or panegyric; and indeed they furnish such a style from this dark cell, as is understood by very few.

Martin Martin (d. 1718)

from A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland Circa 1695

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