The English poet T. E. Hulme said that the root of Romanticism is man's "infinite reservoir of possibilities." Between the French Revolution and the two World Wars, that reservoir burst forth into a new world of promise and crisis, and at the headwaters was the Romantic movement. “Blood, Soil, Paint” is an essay on Romanticism, but it is much more than that. It clarifies the intersection between blood, soil, language, and culture, and shows how each influences the others. What emerges is a deeper understanding of the nationalist currents that arose in the Romantic era and continue to this day.
