The Romantics, many hold, understood morality as they understood art--as the means by which the artist does not imitate nature but rather creates a world of his own. But was this the Romantic aesthetic?

Did Romantic art really seek to reject (as M. H. Abrams argued in a famous study ) art as the mirror (as invoked by older, mimetic theories) to become a lamp, shining by its own unreflected light---the light of the writer's inner (the dynamic unconscious) poetic soul spilled out to illuminate the world.

There was a shift from the mimetic to the expressive----Romanticism was the rebellious child of modernity---and no doubt there are cases that fit this dualistic mirror/lamp model, but surely the opposition between mirror and lamp is too schematic? The lamp (the artist's gaze) shines on something, does it not, even if an expressive art is grounded in affective memory?

rubbish, originally uploaded by poodly.

Is not European romanticism concerned with a dead nature caused by industrial capitalism as well as the return into ourselves? Is not European romanticism also concerned with the dualism of the subject object split in the modern philosophy of the Enlightenment? With organic form in opposition to that of the machine? With the value of belonging to a community?

The romantics did not abandon Aristotle--they reinterpreted him as an organicist rather than a mechanist--- as they placed an emphasis on creativity and imagination in their turn away from the classical standard of unity. What we have inherited from the Romantics is the idea that art expresses our experience of the world, even as its forms of expression extend our experience beyond what the world simply gives us.