Periods of creativity

Differences in the character of creativity depending on age. Storr (1988: 169) distinguished between three periods:

The first period [...] although it may be characterized by works of undoubted genius, is one in which the artist has usually not fully discovered his individual voice. [...]

[A]s an artist becomes more confident, he gains the courage to dispense with whatever aspects of the past are irrelevant to him, and enters upon his second period, in which both his mastery and his individuality are clearly manifest. In this period, the need to communicate whatever he has to say to as wide public as possible is usually evident.

Third period works share certain characteristics (ibid: 174):

First, they are less concerned with communication than what has done before. Second, they are often unconventional in form, and appear to be striving to achieve a new kind of unity between elements which at first sight are extremely disparate. Third, they are characterized be an absence of rhetoric or any need to convince. Fourth, they seem to be exploring remote areas of experience which are intrapersonal or suprapersonal rather than interpersonal. That is, the artist is looking into the depth of his own psyche and is not very much concerned as to whether anyone else will follow him or understand him.