There’s an argument to be made that, since at least the death of Byron, Romanticism has an inescapably political dimension—that for the human spirit to flourish, it is no longer enough to innovate in the realm of poetic form; action must be taken in the realm of social form, and this is why the great Romantics of the last century were all revolutionaries and party-members: Lenin, Che, and, lest one think it exclusively a phenomenon of the left, Heidegger.

Not that I’m making that argument, but it gets at what I’ve found curious in the Romanticon project. Can one resist the universe of death, as Gasda borrows from Bloom, by becoming “a hero of the mind,” or I should say, of the mind alone? Is the “defiance of an inhospitable and yet petty technological civilization” possible without, well, anything in the way of active, open resistance? This isn’t a critique so much as a question of, what seems to me, the very diffuse legacy of Romanticism.