Against the same-old same-old

(From introduction) Romanticism bequeathed a good many things to the beleaguered modern imagination, one of the most provoking of which was the thought that it should get out more. That bit of advice proved all the more challenging because it contradicted the other basic idea which the Romantics left behind – namely, that what mattered was staying inside, wrapped in the private world of subjectivity and ‘mental space’. To this view of things, the raw stuff of what’s out there was at best merely grist to the mill of consciousness: a true modern genius displayed itself, Coleridge said (he coined the phrase ‘mental space’), as ‘a fleeting away of external things, the mind or subject greater than the object’. Coleridge was much preoccupied by such thoughts: Carlyle remembered him sitting in his Highgate den, snuffling interminably about ‘sum-m-mjects’ and ‘om-m-mjects’; and other writers chose a less philosophical idiom to pursue the same sort of notion. Coleridge’s collaborator Wordsworth, for instance, pauses at one point in his verse autobiography to sound the note in his own way: ‘Of genius, power,/Creation and divinity itself/I have been speaking, for my theme has been/What passed within me.’ Rarely can such weight have fallen on those formerly unostentatious words ‘within’ and ‘me’. It’s not so far from that to the stylishly belligerent thing that Picasso is said to have said: ‘I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.’(continued in full text)