‘THE hero is he who is immovably centred’ (Emerson, quoted by Baudelaire, in The Work and Life of Eugène Delacroix). ‘This’, says Baudelaire, ‘can equally be applied to the domain of poetry and art. The literary hero — that is to say the true writer, is he who is immovably centred…. It is not surprising, then, that Delacroix has a very pronounced sympathy for those writers who are concise and concentrated, those whose prose, laden with but few ornaments, has the air of imitating the rapid movements of thought, and whose phrase resembles a gesture.’
‘That which marks most visibly the style of Delacroix, is the conciseness, and a species of intensity without ostentation, the result of the habitual concentration of all his spiritual forces upon a given point.’—BAUDELAIRE, ibid.
‘It is … a metre-making argument that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.’—EMERSON (‘The Poet’), Essays.
Blake said: ‘A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.’—(Descriptive Catalogue).