Classroom Series: the Sublime

Romantic Poetry & the Sublime

Dear read poetry friends,

There are many notions that interest poets — a hope to capture certain feelings or experiences that either get to the heart of something deeply personal or deeply human. The concept of the sublime in poetry is no different. Many poets, especially since the Romantic era, have attempted to capture the experience of the sublime in their work. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the sublime as “Set or raised aloft, high up.” It further describes the feeling of awe created by the sublime as crushing and engulfing, awe-inspiring, but terrifying.

The sublime, in its very definition, operates outside of reason, and thus defies easy definition. The origin of the theory traces back to the third century, when Longinus defined the idea as something that describes the extreme heights of language and thought. In all its definitions since, the sublime has maintained the central component of something beyond reason; thus, poets have long been fascinated with capturing the experience of it. For this post, we’ll be focusing on how the sublime was understood in the nineteenth century, when writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charlotte Smith were striving to capture it in their work.

Edmund Burke and the 18th Century

The sublime was a general aesthetic concept explored in art, science, and literature in the Romantic era. In 1757, writer and politician Edmund Burke wrote a treatise entitled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment, and astonishment is the state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason upon that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.”

Burke’s definition conceives of the sublime as an experience with terror and horror at its center, emotions that confound classical reasoning and create a basis for modern sensitivity — the sensitivity poets of the Romantic era sought to evoke in their poetry. Terror is a crucial component added by Burke to the definition of the sublime. He wrote about it as the feelings of awe, horror, and beauty entwined to create the most intense emotion the mind could be capable of.

Immanuel Kant wrote a few years later in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime on the same subject. According to Kant, the human capacity for imagination fails when overwhelmed by a feeling of vastness of power.

When the Romantic poets picked up the notion of the Sublime, it was with the hopes of capturing this feeling of awe, of being overwhelmed in nature that was both beautiful and terrifying and incomprehensible to the human mind. Poetry was a unique space where something “incomprehensible” could try to be described.

Percy Bysshe Shelley “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni”

Mont Blanc is a mountain located in the Alps, one that Percy Shelley and many of the Romantics encountered in their travels and were fascinated by. In this poem, Shelley compares the mountain’s overwhelming scale and power to the human imagination.

He opens the poem with the universe, and with movements like water. The poem is written in five parts, where Nature (the capital N is an important signifier that what Shelley is considering is of greater significance than just the natural world) and mind meet, moving in similar rhythms. The poem evokes splendour and captures human thought as deriving from nature. Nature is alive; it “bursts and raves” as something dark, powerful, and wild. Shelley’s mind in turn does the same.

“The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—”

In the next section, the landscape is personified a little, the image full of bursting life. Something awful but beautiful. They are fascinated by poetry itself and things that seem both eternal and beyond understanding.

“Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—

Thou many-colour’d, many-voiced vale,

Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,”

Awful is an essential word in this part of the poem, and understanding the sublime as Shelley evokes it. It is something beautiful and deeply awe-inspiring. It’s not awful just as we understand the word now, something horrible, but something horrible that inspires and strikes almost an overwhelming reverence and terror in the mind of the poet.

Charlotte Smith “Sonnet 59”

Charlotte Smith’s “Sonnet 59” was written during a thunderstorm, and is in turn a tumult of a poem. The displays are beautiful but loud and destructive. Smith plays with the Sonnet form in this poem, both subverting the power of poetry and the conventions of the male-dominated poetry scene she was writing within. The sublime in this poem is embattled and terrifying, while the moon stands above it all, serene.

“WHAT awful pageants croud the evening sky!

The low horizon gath’ring vapours shroud,

Sudden from many a deep embattled cloud,

Terrific thunders burst and light’nings fly —”

Later in the poem, Smith calls the moon “Night’s regent — of her calm pavilion proud,” and the moon above the storm has been understood in different ways. Perhaps it is the ruling class above the fighting that rippled through the nineteenth century, a commentary on the French Revolution. Or perhaps, it is a commentary on the sublime as defined by male poets as a concept with domination at its center — but here is something which cannot conquer the even more awe-inspiring moon above the tumult.

William Wordsworth “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,”

“With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.”

In this poem, again Nature offers access to the sublime. The speaker in this poem is writing of his encounter with the countryside, and it offers him insight into links between humanity, the natural world, and the universe. The beauty of the environment and the power it holds make him aware of the place of people within it all.

The sublime has evolved since the Romantics, since their poetic contexts and concerns. Yet in their contentions with the sublime we can find how poetry has always been deeply involved with connecting the natural world to human emotion, how societal unrest can find a place in the tumultuous skies of writing. The American sublime is a beast all its own, as is every understanding of the Sublime which has contended with the literary traditions of the nineteenth century and also uniquely emerged from its own national and poetic traditions.

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This July, we’ll be highlighting a theme of music & dance.

“Dance, Dance, While the Hive Collapses”

By: Tiffany Higgins

Oh my, oh my, I lose myself
I study atlases and cirrus paths
in search of traces of it, of you


	  of that thing, of that song
	  I keep pressing my ear to the current
                  of air to hear …
		      I hear it and it disappears
		     It was all I wanted to do in this life 
		     to sense that phantom tap 

on my nerves, to allow myself
to be hit by it, attacked, aroused
until, as if someone else, I arise

	I dance my part in paradise
        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I read that bees who’ve drunk
imidacloprid 

	     can’t waggle to indicate 
	  to others where the best
	  nectar is located


(you and I also long to map
for each other the sweetest
suck of sap)

	   Workers carry far less food
	    back to the waiting hive. 


		            They wander, wobble
		            can’t bring their way 
		            home alive


The imidacloprid-imbibed
can’t bring it back 
to the colony. 
	      Some hives collapse
	      entirely. 
		        I desire to say that I, I 
		         would do it differently


			I would be the bee, bloomed 
			with pesticide. 


that still would shake out a wiffle
like the finger’s signature
on the iPad at checkout:

     not quite you, but still identity
     more like a wave that solid you 
     yet enough to signify: 


	    There, there, in the far off field
	    spiked acanthus, trumpets of datura


		in the abandoned lot
		on the corner of International and High

		         the mystic assignation
		          the golden throat of light:

			  gorge, gorge, take
		                  your fill, I would cry

		before I too failed
		and my bumbling body lay down to die


I’d dance my last dance
to rescue the hive
yes, I’d carry the amber whirrers
out alive			~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


          Or not. Perhaps I too would succumb


to the corn syrup, chemical 
piped into our supply. 

      (I, too, longing to find my
       way to you, 
       would go off course.)

	Alas. There is still melody, 
	Rhythm, someone is streaking 
	out in air, droning


	     around the phonograph, which is the grooved
	     heart valve of the black vinyl
	   divine who is winding this universe. 
	    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Someone is dancing us. 
Will it be you? 			~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dance, dance, as the hive collapses
Dance, dance, while the colony disassembles
Dance the occasion
Dance the gorgeous design 	   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



inside the honey
of our lit up veins 	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
between the stripes and streams
of these swift rays

Until next week,

Happy writing!

Claire