"There is a physical sensation that comes from experiencing acute emotional pain—like a stab wound straight to the chest. It hurts quick and fast, stealing the breath from one’s lungs in a long, aching moment. For Romantic thinkers, there is a merit to this kind of emotion. For the Romantics, this kind of emotion functions outside of one’s personal control and thus can be harnessed and woven into a net of human connection. Specific Romantics attribute this harnessing of powerful emotion to the task of an artist. According to William Wordsworth in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, an artist is one who can successfully replicate this emotion through his poetry. In William Hazlitt’s “On Gusto,” genuine emotion recollected in art, art with “gusto,” is the work indicative of a true artist. However, not all Romantics believed that the ability to reproduce powerful emotion is what makes an artist an artist. Leigh Hunt expresses in his preface to Foliage that an artist is one who finds pleasure in what he creates, directly objecting to the ideas of Wordsworth and Hazlitt. For John Keats, he uniquely defines artistic purpose through “Melancholy;” to be melancholic is to understand the nuance of existence, that beauty and sublimity live in coexistence with one another. According to Keats, this understanding is from which an artist is born."
​