Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 189. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The solitary figure, viewed from behind, is caught in an instant of sublimity, an enlargement of the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature. It was strikingly echoed in pictorial form by Casper David Friedrich’s painting “The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (1818). Much of this rhetoric of genius, Abrams argues, was prevalent in Europe and North America through the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Shelley was Abrams’s typical example, although he could as easily have cited individuals from other spheres, such as Mozart, Goethe, or Johann Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest theoretical mathematicians of the period.

1 Inspiration was a visitation from somewhere outside the body entirely. Genius, he said, was believed to have specific features: it was sudden and effortless it was involuntary it generated intense mental excitement and the completed musical, visual, or conceptual achievement sometimes seemed unfamiliar to the author, almost as though it were produced by someone else.

In his classic text The Mirror and the Lamp, published in 1953, the literary critic Meyer Abrams described the concept of genius in the Romantic imagination.

Hereditary genius galton