Works of art must be viewed in the light of its own, entire context. Croce believed in the intuition as the main source of artistic creation - art is based on intuition which exist before it is apprehended by an individual artists. A poet realizes his intuition verbally. According to Croce, poetry is emotion, an expression of the soul at the moment of intuition. The task of an art critic is to characterize the image of the work, a unified mental picture of a particular thing, define its emotional aspects and evaluate how faithful the image is to emotion.
Image consists of smaller parts, plot, setting, language.
Croce's conservative, classical taste led him to view with suspicion French symbolist poetry and experimental movements. He disliked Pirandello and finally gave up writing on contemporary poetry, novels and plays.