"...frozen icons of the artist's self?"

"Is the mortal, transient artist the servant of an independent world-order which stretches before and after him, to whose laws he acknowledges himself subject and parts of which are imitated in his works? If so, a realistic, objective, living art is possible, of the kind we associate with Homer or Shakespeare (or perhaps, outside Germany, with the nineteenth-century novel). But if not, if the artist remains an autonomous creator, acknowledging no ordering force except that which he finds within him, can his work ever escape from its dependence upon him? Must it not remain...frozen icons of the artist's self?"

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 165-166.