High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.

[page needed]
For over a decade Paglia was the partner of artist Alison Maddex. Clive James noted that Paglia tends to focus on American works as it moves from Shakespeare forward through time with Yeats following Coleridge as the last European discussed but emphasized her range of sympathy and her ability to juxtapose and unite distinct art forms in her analysis.

She is known as a critic of American feminism and is also strongly critical of the influence of French writers such as Jacques Lacan Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Paglia has celebrated Madonna and taken radical libertarian positions on controversial social issues such as abortion homosexuality and drug use. She wrote Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) a best-selling work of literary criticism among other books and essays.