I'm not only a romanticist but a romantic myself. I take it for granted the originality matters.

The rhetoric of theory is always in a bind. It pronounces ideas and denounces failures to accept or grasp them while insisting that there are no grounds either for accepting or grasping ideas.

The basic change in the landscape since my salad days started with the defensive rediscovery of history and politics by all the theoretically-oriented academics in the late seventies and eighties.

Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power.

I make a distinction between theory and methodology, the latter being the practical deployment of a premise. Theory on the contrary may well be applied, hence becomes methodology without a hitch, but isn't necessarily practical at all.

I don't think theory adds to criticism. (Methodology does, for better or worse.) Theory's function is to make criticism self-conscious, maybe even a little sheepish, about its ex cathedra pronouncements.

Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.