The English poet and clergyman Edward Young is rightly regarded as being a precursor of Romanticism. Long before the Romantic movement got underway, Young was already articulating some of its most important aesthetic principles.

In common with a later generation of artists and writers, Young regarded genius as being the hallmark of the true artist. It was genius, above all, that enabled artists to produce truly original works that owed nothing to imitating the great works of the past.

This was a radical notion in the eighteenth century. This was the age of neoclassicism, in which the prevailing aesthetic held that great works of art emerged from imitation of the undisputed masterpieces of classical antiquity. To that end, neoclassicism laid down a fairly strict set of rules and guidelines that artists were expected to follow.

Young challenged this rule-bound aesthetic, arguing instead that genius cannot be taught, nor does it emerge from the following of rules, which if anything tends to stifle genius. As genius is natural, it should not be shackled by artificial rules, models, and conventions. Rules are all very well when it comes to learning, but as far as Young's concerned, poetry, as with all the arts, is the province of genius, not learning. Hence, rules do not apply.

It is only by artists developing their natural genius, thinks Young, that they can produce truly original works of art and go on to excel their predecessors from antiquity. Young cites Shakespeare as an example of someone who did precisely that, and he sees no reason why the present generation of writers can't do the same. But to do this, they must first break free from the shackles of imitation and stop assuming that they are inherently inferior to writers from the dim and distant past.