During the romantic era, the notion that individuality represented the source of all new developments in the art world came to have enormous cultural influence in the West. Rather than seeing poets, writers, visual artists, composers and performers as temporally bound people working within (and often against) the bounds of their own cultures and prison-houses of language to produce their work, the romantic era tended to view artists as visionaries who dove into the depths of their individuality to present new, personal works that spoke of their vision of the world.