An artist must create a personal cosmos, a verdant world in continuity with tradition, further fulfilling man’s “awareness,” his “degree of consciousness,” and bringing new subtilization, vision and beauty to the elements of experience. It is in this way that the Idea, powered by conviction and necessity, will create its own style, and the singular, momentous structure capable of realizing its intent.
“Lately our poets loiter’d in green lanes,
Content to catch the ballads of the plains;
I fancied I had strength to climb
A loftier station at no distant time,
And might securely from intrusion doze
Upon the flowers thro’ which Ilissus flows.
In those pale olive grounds all voices cease,
And from afar dust fills the paths of Greece.
My slumber broken and my doublet torn,
I find the laurel also bears thorn.”
Walter Savage Landor