Have you ever gone on a hike and arrived at a clearing where a massive waterfall crashes into a pool that is so beautiful it catches your breath? Have you ever been so awestricken by a vast valley that disappears into the horizon or saw images of the marina trench that left you breathless? These awe-inspiring images are what we would call the sublime.
Sublime definition
The sublime is associated with the extraordinary and grand. The use of language or literary devices that evoke the feeling of grandeur, and that which inspires awe or fear in the reader, may be defined as the sublime.
Literary history and explanation of the sublime
Let’s take a look at how philosophers developed the concept of the sublime. For this, we need to travel back to ancient times.
Longinus (1st-cent. AD)
On the Sublime (1st century AD) is a piece of literary criticism that has been attributed to 1st-century philosopher Longinus. For Longinus, the sublime is about the poet’s ability to translate his passions into passionate poetry that sweeps away the reader.
What is key to note here is that Longinus uses ‘sublime’ as an adjective, to describe:
- the genius of a poet
- the greatness of a poem.
Longinus says that rules of composition aren’t necessary to make great poetry. Intense passion should be the driving force behind poetry, so that the reader can feel a great passion in reading the poem, too. This is the sublime for Longinus.
Longinus on nature and the sublime
First, Longinus compared great poetry to nature. For Longinus, great poetry is as moving as the powerful forces of nature:
It strikes us like a lightening bolt, sweeps us away like a flood, awes us like a storm and we are attracted to greatness in writing the same way we admire stormy oceans rather than small streams, or the fiery powers of a volcano rather than the domesticated fire of a hearth.
- Longinus, On the Sublime
Second, Longinus believed that nature was a great subject for poetry precisely because nature shares many qualities with great poetry: the intensity of nature overwhelms us and astounds us as great poetry does.
Bear this idea in mind because it was very influential to the Romantics.
Whatever is useful or needful lies easily within man’s reach; but he keeps his homage for what is astounding.
- Longinus, On the Sublime
This early conception of the sublime was all about poetry. Only later did the idea of the sublime become directly associated with nature, and then circle back around to being associated with the nature-centred poetry of the Romantics.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Nicolas Boileau’s translation of On the Sublime into French in 1674 made Longinus’s philosophy accessible to Europeans and the idea took off. In the late 17th to the 18th century, ‘the sublime’ was used less as an adjective and more as a noun.
In 1757, Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Feelings of the Sublime and Beautiful where he made a clear distinction between ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the sublime’. Building on Longinus, Burke distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime:
Key sources and characteristics of the beautiful:
- Smallness
- Symmetry
- Smoothness
- Delicacy
- Brightness of colour
To Burke, beauty is a simple pleasure.
Key sources and characteristics of the sublime:
- Vastness
- Ruggedness
- Darkness
- Power
Burke argues that these features produce in us a sense of terror, which is key to an experience of the sublime. Burke’s treatise focuses on how the sublime affects the body. The sheerness of a sublime scene (a waterfall, steep cliffs) triggers our sense of self-preservation, as we feel like we are in danger. Burke says that this terror produces a sense of delight in us, like a pleasure-in-pain sensation.
Burke on poetry
Burke turns back to Longinus’s ideas of great poetry. Burke says that writers should let the vast wildness of nature and the feelings it inspires guide poetry.
But art can never give the rules that make an art. This is, I believe, the reason why artists in general, and poets, principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle: they have been rather imitators of one another than of nature.
- Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Feelings of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
For Burke, great poetry depicts encounters with the sublimity of nature and communicates the profoundness of this experience to the reader.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant also contributed to the sublime. Kant takes Longinus’s idea that the sublime is about individual genius further, and says that the sublime was not out there in the world but in the mind.
Transcendence
For Kant, the sublime is transcendental. The sublime is about the transcendental nature of the human mind and its ability to piece together and add qualities – such as the quality of the sublime – to sensory experiences. Kant’s idea of the sublime is known as the transcendental sublime.
The sublime in poetry
Before we move on to the Romantic poets, let’s first consolidate what we’ve learned about the sublime so far and see why the sublime is often used in poetry:
- Intensity of experience, as can be experienced in the sublime, is what gives rise to (great) poetry. The poet translates the immense power they perceive in the world into powerful poetry.
- The sublime is about experiences. The poet experiences the sublime and then writes about it in a way that is in itself sublime. The reader can thus experience the sublime from a point of distance and safety.
- Our imagination is brought out by poetry as it is by nature; our imagination feels as boundless as nature and the universe do.
- Poetry allows us to make free associations, with imagination filling in the blanks.
- The ineffability of the sublime is well communicated in poetry because poetry makes strong use of non-linguistic devices such as metre, rhythm and rhyme.
Examples of the sublime: the Romantics
Romanticism
A literary and artistic movement that developed in the late 18th century in opposition to the cold rationality of the Age of Enlightenment (late 17th cent. to the early 19th cent.). The Romantics emphasised imagination and individual artistic expression and emphasised the role of nature in bringing out the artist's creative spirit.
Taking up the sublime in their poetry was an apt way of rebelling against cold reason by embracing excesses of emotion and passion. The Romantics subscribed to Longinus and Burke’s ideas that passion should guide poetry, not restrictive rules.
Let’s take a look at how Romantic poets built on the concept of the sublime in their works.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
Wordsworth was one of the first Romantic poets to write about the sublimity of nature in his poetry. Let’s take a look at an excerpt from ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798) by Wordsworth.
As you read, keep in mind Kant’s idea of the sublime, particularly the transcendental sublime.
…And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
- Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, Lines 95-113
We can immediately spot the sublime in Wordsworth’s poetry. Pay attention to the way he says that nature ‘disturbs’ him with ‘joy’. Normally joy does not disturb. This is a description of the complex pleasure of the sublime.
Wordsworth's conception of the sublime falls nicely in line with Kant’s idea of the transcendental sublime, where feelings of the sublime are seen as a great triumph of the mind for its ability to have such complex feelings and see the quality of sublimity in the world.
Wordsworth attempts to rationalise the sublimity of nature. He sees nature as a mirror of himself and attempts to bring nature into harmony in the poem.
John Keats (1795-1821)
John Keats (1795-1821).
Another Romantic poet, John Keats, took issue with Kant’s and Wordsworth’s ideas of the sublime, as he believed the mind actually got in the way of experiencing the sublime.
Keats called this tendency to project the self onto nature and the attempt to rationalise its wildness as 'the egotistical sublime'. To Keats, Wordsworth was just being egotistical by making the complexity of nature all about him.
Keats believed that the poet should not try to impose rationality and morality on nature. Instead, Keats's sublime is inspired by Longinus's idea that passionate experiences of the sublime in nature produce passionate, sublime poetry that, in turn, leads the reader to experience sublimity. Let’s take a look at how Keats puts this into practice in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819).
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
- John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Lines 31-40.
Keats describes nature with imagery of the sublime. For example, the setting is dark ‘there is no light’ and ‘verdurous glooms’ and he describes the moon as powerful as ‘Queen-Moon’.
Crucially, rationality is depicted as ‘dull’, it ‘perplexes’ and holds the speaker back. Keats is not reducing nature to a mere mirror of himself. Instead, he lets himself be swept away in the emotional sublime experience of observing the giant moon in the dark. He uses the ode form, a form used to express emotions, to communicate this emotional experience.
For Keats, and for Burke, the sublime is about the intensity of emotion. Like a true Romantic, Keats rebels against the cold rationality that Kant tried to impose on the emotional experience of the sublime.
Percey Shelley (1792-1822) and Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
Many other poets and novelists have depicted sublime experiences in their writing. The trip to the French Alps the poet Percey Shelley and his novelist wife took, for example, inspired two great works of literature on the sublime. Their sublime experience of the Alps led Percy Shelley to write ‘Mont Blanc’ (1817), and Mary Shelley to write one of the most iconic Gothic novels, Frankenstein (1818). Both works depict scenes of terrifying sublimity the Alps.
Now, if there’s one thing to learn about the sublime from the Romantics, it is that you should get out there and go experience the sublime! (From a safe distance, of course.)
Sublime - Key takeaways
The sublime is a complex emotional experience of awe, which is both terrifying and pleasurable. The sublime also refers to how poets communicate this experience in poetry.
The sublime was developed as a concept across the millennia, by philosophers and poets alike. Key philosophers of the sublime are Longinus (in Ancient times), and Burke and Kant in the 18th century. Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Keats also developed the idea of the sublime in their own writing, with Keats coming up with the concept of 'the egotistical sublime' to criticise Wordsworth's own conception of the sublime.
The sublime played a key role in the development of the Romantic movement.
Key sources and characteristics of the sublime are vastness, ruggedness, darkness, power and a feeling of terror, which leads to a pleasure-in-pain experience.
Poetry is a great form to express the sublime because poetry is all about experiencing intense emotions.
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