known is created by one's own thought. If the act of knowing imposes the patterns of the individual's thought on the world, then, it seemed, the world must have been produced by the individual's own ego. The resultant belief was that "the only valid world is not that of objective reality but that of ideas." This world can be made known by means of intellection, which the philosopher does, or by giving material form to the idea, as the artist does. The artist and the thinker were, therefore, engaged in the same process but employed different means. Thinkers work with concepts and avoid the use of the real, but artists carry out the "paradoxical task of attempting to reveal the Ideal within the Real." This is, therefore, a wholly subjective art that is not interested in replicating the real world but in conveying things in the form the artist's imagination has given them. The poet Heine, in his scathing and fitfully sarcastic repudiation of Romanticism, claimed that the movement was based on no philosophy. But he explicitly responded to the t
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