Looking back at two such different writers as Montaigne and Tasso, and admiring both, Romantics were prepared to go along with Montaigne’s belief that Tasso had blown his own mind with poetry. They could understand Montaigne’s sadness about it. What they could neither understand nor forgive was his irritation. Romantics did blinding brilliance; they did melancholy; they did intense imaginative identification. They did not do irritation.
