Abstract: Poetry and the Thought of Inspiration is a study of inspiration in Russian, English and French poetry from Romanticism through Modernism and an investigation of the ways in which poetry continues to mark, mediate and linger over its own origins. Looking closely at selected poetry and prose of Mikhail Lomonosov, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Elizabeth Bishop, among others, I examine distinct modes of inspired writing: rapture, trauma, possession, censorship, ennui and insomnia. More than metacritical gesture, inspiration gives a poem the language with which it may tell of its own becoming. My aim in this study is to explore the rhetorical and formal mechanisms of this inspired turn of the lyric. I ask how claims of inspiration within the body of the poem allow a poet to turn back, in the primal Orphic gesture, to the origins of the poem, and how the turn of inspiration may be conceived as the central movement of the Romantic and post-Romantic lyric. If, moreover, inspiration is the movement by which a poem exceeds itself in gazing beyond its linguistic and formal limits, what is the object of the poem's inspired gaze? I seek to articulate this zone between the linguistic life of the poem and the life of the poet, which enters the poem by way of inspiration. Finally, in tracing the rhetoric of inspiration and the mechanism of poetry's turn toward its origins, I consider what I call 'the economy of inspiration', the incommensurable exchange between gain and loss that underpins Orpheus' turn toward Eurydice, as well as the act of respiration, both of which serve as the main figures of this study. Hence, how a poem looks back, the object of its turn and its negotiation of loss and gain by means of that turn are the guiding questions of each of the chapters, while the figure of Orpheus and the etymological figure of inspiration structure the study and guide it from rapture and invocation in the first chapter to spleen and insomnia in the last.