But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers. Now, while admiring, as others doubtless will admire, the details we have to relate, our main preoccupation concerned a matter to which no one before ourselves had given a thought. D'Artagnan

In fact, he was a romantic in the strict sense of the term, one who believed that music should be composed and played through the “addition of strangeness to beauty.”

Is it nonsense or brilliance? Wrote Virginia Woolf in the margin of her own manuscript.

“It was like that for Shakespeare and Balzac and Tolstoy, at least. The classic images they created were born from their mental wombs. But today’s practitioners of literature have lost that creativity. Their minds give birth only to shattered fragments and freaks, whose brief lives are nothing but cryptic spasms devoid of reason. Then they sweep up

A natural outgrowth of the romantic’s interest in emotional states—the primacy of the subjective experience over objective truth—was the movement’s attraction to the nostalgic and the uncanny.