Poetry, like dreams, creates a state where unfulfilled unconscious wishes are gratified. Poetry is the voice then of the unconscious. The poem is usually a product of the day-dream, which is related to the dream of sleep, for both species of dreams reveal the unconscious. Poetry shows conflicts and makes adjustments to reality. Poetry is aesthetic therapeutics.[184:A]
The dream poems of literature are so numerous that one is amazed that the theory of poetry as a dream has not been more prominently discussed by literary critics. In the middle ages many poems were cast in the form of dreams. The allegory was generally a dream. Who can doubt that the _Divine Comedy_ and _Pilgrim's Progress_, both in the form of dreams, were attempts by the poets to adjust themselves to reality, to purge themselves and relieve their unconscious?
Even those poets who are always hiding their souls and making inlays of verbal mosaic reveal themselves. Their dabbling with trifles is indicative of an inability or lack of courage to think and feel. They thus make a disclosure more marked than if they had sung their private thoughts openly.
Poetry is a psychological art rather than a plastic one. It deals with the soul. Horace's statement that if the poet would make the reader weep he must weep himself, is true. Yet we have often failed to recognize that poetry is a genuine personal cry of a man who dreams. We have confused poetry with prosody, instead of identifying it with the unconscious.
The poem with the social message, the problem play for example, or the novel with a purpose, also belongs to the literature of dreams. The poet sees foul infections infiltrating society; he has often himself been a victim of social abuses. He voices complaints about the unjust system and its tyrannical sway. He shows himself and others suffering in its coils. He dreams a vision of a more beautiful and just system of society where neither he nor others are consumed in vexation. He states ecstatically the ideas that come to him as he condemns; he entertains and expresses views whose adoption would enable man to reconstruct society on a better plan.
His intellect is colored by his inability to adjust himself socially. His dreams give him ideas. He does not have to become a reformer, but he recognizes social wrongs resulting from custom or stupidity or downright wickedness. Personal repression and dreaming produce not only love poems, but poems containing utopias of society, plans for improvement.