Sublime (literary)

The literary concept of the sublime became important in the eighteenth century. It is associated with the 1757 treatise by Edmund Burke, though it has earlier roots. The idea of the sublime was taken up by Immanuel Kant and the Romantic poets including especially William Wordsworth.

The earliest text on the sublime was written sometime in the first or third century AD by the Greek writer (pseudo-) Longinus in his work On the Sublime (Περὶ ὕψους, Perì hýpsous). Longinus defines the literary sublime as "excellence in language", the "expression of a great spirit" and the power to provoke "ecstasy" in one's readers. Longinus holds that the goal of a writer should be to produce a form of ecstasy.

Boileau introduced the sublime into modern critical discourse in the Preface to his translation of Longinus: Traite du Sublime de Longin (1674).

The little-known writer John Baillie wrote An Essay on the Sublime in 1747.

Most scholars point to Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) as the landmark treatise on the sublime. Burke defines the sublime as "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger... Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror." Burke believed that the sublime was something that could provoke terror in the audience, for terror and pain were the strongest of emotions. However, he also believed there was an inherent "pleasure" in this emotion. Anything that is great, infinite or obscure could be an object of terror and the sublime, for there was an element of the unknown about them. Burke finds more than a few instances of terror and the sublime in John Milton's Paradise Lost, in which the figures of Death and Satan are considered sublime.

Immanuel Kant in his The Critique of Judgment (1790) further clarifies Burke's definition of the sublime, mostly in contrast to the beautiful. He says that the beautiful in nature is not quantifiable, but rather focused only in color, form, surface, etc. of an object. Therefore, the beautiful is to be "regarded as a presentation of an indeterminate concept of understanding." However, to Kant, the sublime is more infinite and can be found even in an object that has no form. The sublime should be regarded as a "presentation of an indeterminate concept of reason." Basically, Kant argues that beauty is a temporary response of understanding, but the sublime goes beyond the aesthetics into a realm of reason. Whereas Burke argues that the sublime arises from an object that incites terror, Kant says that an object can be terrifying and thus, sublime, without the beholder actually being afraid of it. But there is much more to Kant's definition of the sublime. He claims that the sublime in itself is so great that anything compared to it must necessarily be considered small. And, because of that, an important aspect of the sublime is the work of one's imagination to comprehend something so great that it seems inconceivable; thus, one major aspect of the sublime is the power of mankind's mind to recognize it. Kant transforms the sublime from a terrifying object of nature to something intricately connected to the rational mind, and hence to morality.

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