The Romantic poets were obsessed with sublimity that is, with the idea of transcendence, with possible crossings between the self and nature, with the boundlessness of the universe. “In the European Enlightenment,” Harold Bloom explains, the literary idea of the sublime “was strangely transformed into a vision of the terror that could be perceived both in nature and in art, a terror uneasily allied with pleasurable sensations of augmented power, and even of narcissistic freedom, freedom in the shape of that wildness that Freud dubbed ‘the omnipotence of thought,’ the greatest of all narcissistic illusions.”
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” There are subsequent philosophical investigations of the sublime in Immanuel Kant, who says, “We call that sublime which is absolutely great” ( Critique of Judgment, 1790), Arthur Schopenhauer (the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, 1819), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ( Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1835). Edmund Burke took up the effects of the sublime in language in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), where he argues that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. Alexander Pope claimed that Longinus “is himself the great Sublime he draws” (“An Essay on Criticism,” 1711). Longinus’s treatise was translated into French by Boileau (1674) and passed quickly into English. The repression takes the form of a defense (in this case mimesis) in which the reader makes the sublime her own.Equilibrium is seemingly restored through an identification with that power or authority (“exalts our soul as though we had created what we merely heard”) and a repression of that power.The sublime moment is preceded by a disruption in normal consciousness (“parts all matter this way and that”) whose equilibrium must be restored.This power is perceived in a moment (like a “lightning-flash”) through the effects of speech and language.The experience of the sublime is an affective or emotional response (joy and ecstasy) to power, authenticity or authority.As Mary Arensberg summarizes them in The American Sublime (1986): Longinus raised the rhetorical and psychological issues that haunt the idea of the sublime, ancient and modern. Filled with joy and pride, we come to believe we have created what we have only heard.” The sublime is our “joining” with the great. “It is our nature to be elevated and exalted by true sublimity. “Sublimity is always an eminence and excellence in language,” he claims. It is a style of “loftiness,” something we experience through words. It is accessed through rhetoric, the devices of speech and poetry. For him, the sublime describes the heights in language and thought. In the third century, Longinus inaugurated the literary idea and tradition of the sublime in his treatise Peri Hypsous ( On the Sublime). As Weiskel puts it, “We cannot conceive of a literal sublime.” The sublime is one of our large metaphors. The Oxford English Dictionary also describes the effects of the sublime as crushing or engulfing, something that cannot be resisted. “The essential claim of the sublime,” Thomas Weiskel asserts in The Romantic Sublime (1986), “is that man can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human.” The sublime instills a feeling of awe in us, which can be terrifying. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the sublime as “Set or raised aloft, high up.” The word derives from the Latin sublimus, a combination of sub (up to) and limen (lintel, the top piece of a door) and suggests nobility and majesty, the ultimate height, a soaring grandeur, as in a skyscraper or a mountain, or as in a dizzying feeling, a heroic deed, a spiritual attainment, a poetic expression-something that takes us beyond ourselves, something boundless, the transporting blow. The following definition of the term the sublime is reprinted from A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch. The sublime is a moment or description of something deeply transcendent or awe-inspiring in a poem.
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