Sublime

Sublime: A characteristic of nature and art that embodies grandeur and nobility 

and evokes in its audience a sense of awe. In literature, the term derives from 

the treatise On the Sublime (first century A.D.), traditionally attributed (almost 

certainly erroneously) to Longinus, a Greek rhetorician and philosopher. For 

“Longinus,” the sublime is the emotional response to a spoken or written utterance of great power, which at first overwhelms and later creates in the reader/

listener a feeling of transcendence.

Interest in sublimity in art and literature re-emerged in late 18th-century 

England with the publication of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of 

Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke’s distinction between the awesome 

power of the sublime and the more constrained and decorous appeal of the beauti-

ful played an infl uential role in the development of English ROMANTICISM. Many 

Romantic poets strove to achieve the effects of sublimity by conceiving of literature as 

an ORGANIC FORM, having, potentially at least, the force and grandeur of nature.

The American sublime is a term for the distinctive role that the concept has 

played in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, 

and Wallace Stevens.

The American Sublime (1986), edited by Mary Arensberg, is a collection of critical essays on the topic.

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