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...