ABSTRACT
We have arrived at a great story of the power of art, the story of art as expression. Many of my readers, indeed, will already intuitively feel that art is importantly to do with self-expression, for we are brought up in the aftermath of Romanticism with its image of the artist possessed of powerful feelings of joy or suffering and pouring them into art. Keats’s nightingale, which, from the heavens, pours its full heart in the profuse strains of unpremeditated art, stands as the image of the romantic artist giving vent, in Wordsworth’s phrase, to a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
