I would like to use these three questions as the starting-point for our discussion of the Romantic Manifesto. This insight is really the key to Rand's aesthetics, I believe. And Rand seems to think so as well, given the amount of space she devotes to it in the essay. Allow me to include diverse quotes on this point, so that you can see for yourself the importance of this insight to her theory of art. Art isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represent man's fundamental view of himself and of existence.
Art is a concretization of metaphysics.
Art brings man's concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts. Art converts man's metaphysical abstractions into the equivalent of concretes, into specific entities open to man's direct perception. These are unquestionably forms of art, and it is to these that Rand is referring in her discussion of art. Rand does not put the question that way, but I think she does have an answer. Reality itself is and always remains concrete and particular, no matter what we make of our universal abstractions.