Definition of "afflatus"

'Tis extremely difficult to keep up the Spirit of Poetry in another's Compoſitions, tho' you catch all the […] apteſt Moments; and never employ the Mind, but when there is an Impetus comes upon it toward that particular buſineſs: […] I know not how far this was the Caſe with Mr. [Alexander] Pope, in this performance: but wherever it was, the Poet will be little more than a common Man: He is, at ſuch times, much the ſame as a Prophet without his Afflatus.

1726, [Joseph Spence], “Evening the Third”, in An Essay on Pope's Odyssey: In which some Particular Beauties and Blemishes of that Work are Consider'd, London: Printed for James and J. Knapton, R. Knaplock, W. and J. Innys, J. Wyatt, D. Midwinter, booksellers in St. Paul's Church-Yard, London; and S. Wilmot, bookseller in Oxford, pages 147–148

[…] Men acted by seducing spirits: for πνεύματα doth often signify the impulses or afflatuses of good or evil spirits; […] You are zealous, πνευματων, of spiritual gifts, or afflatuses, and so throughout the chapter; […]

1822, Simon Patrick, William Lowth, Richard Arnald, Daniel Whitby, Moses Lowman, “The First Epistle to Timothy. With Annotations. [Annotations on Chap. IV.]”, in J[ohn] R[ogers] Pitman, editor, A Critical Commentary and Paraphrase on the Old and New Testament and the Apocrypha. [...] In Six Volumes, new edition, volume VI, London: Printed by J. F. Dove, St. John's Square; for Richard Priestley, 143, High Holborn, page 293

He used to gallop Rebecca over the neighbouring Dumpling Downs, or into the county town, which, if you please, we shall call Chatteris, spouting his own poems, and filled with quite a Byronic afflatus as he thought.

1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 3, in The History of Pendennis. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850

We had been talking about the masters who had achieved but a single masterpiece,—the artists and poets who but once in their lives had known the divine afflatus, and touched the high level of the best.

1873 March, H[enry] James Jr., “The Madonna of the Future”, in The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics, volume XXXI, number CLXXXV, Boston, Mass.: James R. Osgood and Company, late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood & Co., page 276

Miss Verena was a natural genius, and he hoped very much she [Miss Chancellor] wasn't going to take the nature out of her. She could study up as she went along; she had got the great thing that you couldn't learn, a kind of divine afflatus, as the ancients used to say, and she had better just begin on that.

1885–1886, Henry James, chapter XVII, in The Bostonians […], London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published 16 February 1886, 1st book, page 141

"I hope," he [William Petty] writes to Aubrey, "that no man takes what I say about the living and dying of men for a mathematical demonstration." But, when the afflatus was on him, he was prone to take what he said for a mathematical demonstration himself.

1900 May, Charles H[enry] Hull, “Petty’s Place in the History of Economic Theory”, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, volume 14, number 3, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, section II, page 318

Imagine a sentimental young man of the provinces, awaking one morning to the somewhat startling discovery that he is full of the divine afflatus, and nominated by the hierarchy of hell to enrich the literature of his fatherland.

1920, H[enry] L[ouis] Mencken, “The National Letters. 4. The Ferment Underground.”, in Prejudices: Second Series, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, page 26

Titled "Citizen Clem" in Britain (Oxford University Press published it here as "Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain"), it is a study in actual radical accomplishment with minimal radical afflatus—a story of how real social change can be achieved, providing previously unimaginable benefits to working people, entirely within an embrace of parliamentary principles as absolute and as heroic as any in the annals of democracy.

2018 January 2, Adam Gopnik, “Never Mind Churchill, Clement Attlee is a Model for These Times”, in The New Yorker‎, archived from the original on 7 January 2018