Out of these same altered states, at once human and divine, the Romantic movement defined the “symbol” as much more than an arbitrary linguistic sign or artificial metaphor. The symbol participates in that which it expresses. Words are experiences. The Romantic writers also fully recognized that symbols grow cold and stale and must be replaced by other newer symbolic real experiences, which is what they themselves were all about. Hence their poetic, visual, and musical arts. Abrams argues that this, in the end, is a “total revolution of consciousness” that took place, not at all accidentally,
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