“At the center of aesthetic theory at the turn of the eighteenth century is the semi-mystical doctrine of the symbol. For Romanticism, indeed, the symbol becomes the panacea for all problems. Within it, a whole set of conflicts which were thought to be insoluble in ordinary life—between subject and object, the universal and the particular, the sensuous and the conceptual, material and spiritual, order and spontaneity—could be magically resolved.” —Eagleton, Literary Theory
