The Folktale

Abstract

The artist as poet, visionary, seer, prophet, outcast and exile is an obsessive and recurrent figure in Romantic literature. The semantic drift has grown so familiar that it is all but invisible: we take it as a matter of course that the writer should write about the artist’s predicament — why, indeed, should he not? — or that in a poem the figure of the poet should obtrude upon the reader’s consciousness in an insistent and self-dramatising way, presenting himself as a person endowed with transcendent consciousness and with a unique power to feel, interpret and understand. Yet such has not always been the case. Poets have often been assigned or have assigned to themselves the possession of divine inspiration, yet they have not always made themselves their own subject or suggested that the thoughts and feelings which they articulate are to be regarded not simply as deeply felt or experienced, but as specific to the person who assumes the role of artist. That is to say, the theme of the artist in Romantic literature has distinctive implications. It predicates a cleavage between the artist and the world and the work of art appears in the guise of resolution and absolution.