Romantic Writings

Nature and the Sublime:

“Nothing can be more sad and more disquieting than this situation in the world; to be the sole spark of life in the vast realm of death, the lonely centre of a lonely circle.”

Heinrich von Kleist, 1809

The Sublime:

A philosophical term

An aesthetic term – an aesthetic category important to literature and art.

Refers to a moment of intense feeling:

The awe-inspiring, the grandiose.

The terrifying or vast

That which is ineffable, ungraspable, unknowable, unimaginable

The individual‟s confrontation with the infinite – (space, time)

The paradoxical mix of intense aesthetic pleasure and fear, horror or pain. (this is more the

Kantian view)

See Burke‟s definitions of the sublime on the handout on Blackboard. 

Thomas Burnet (extract on handout) offers an early description of nature as sublime. However, Burnet

is also important because he gives us an idea of how nature (and the world in general) was viewed in

the pre-Romantic period.

Burnet‟s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1691) was accepted as a truthful account of the history of the

earth – it was an early attempt at writing a geological account of the world, but it was firmly

embedded in religious doctrine.

The world originally, as God created it, was perfectly smooth, there were no valleys, no mountains, no

caves, gorges or seas. It existed in a state of perpetual spring – it was the Edenic world of Adam and

Eve. When „man‟ sinned, God punished him by cracking open the surface of the world so that parts of 

it fell into the abyss and the waters rose out of the abyss and created the seas. When the waters

withdrew, the world was left as we see it today – in a state (according to Burnet) of chaos and disorder

with mountains valleys, caves etc.

Thus, the earth and its geological features were seen as graphic representation of the power and wrath

of God – the mountains, deserts, the wilderness were all places of evil, places to avoid as they were

devoid of God – they were places where you were most likely to meet the devil.

The Romantic perception of nature changes this approach to the world. Philosophers like Rousseau

and poets like Wordsworth, who begin to see the city and the assertion of „civilisation‟ as responsible

for the corruption of humanity, start to think of nature as a place of beauty, innocence and purity –  

they turn Burnet‟s view around and begin to see God actually in nature.

This new attitude helps to develop the notion of sublime nature – and particularly in its highly

dramatic manifestations (deserts, mountains, seascapes, caves) which are re-evaluated as both

terrifying and awesome.

Types of sublime:

Natural sublime  – landscape, the wilderness

Human sublime  – the contrast between humanity and nature, the urban sublime.

Sublime imagination  – the creation of imaginative images that produce the sublime (remember

Blake‟s painting of the „soul of a flea‟?) or text that creates the feeling of the sublime – the

supernatural, Coleridge‟s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” for example. 

 

 

The sublime is an important concept for art and literature – Burke invents, to some degree, a taste for

the sublime (see his definition of the sublime on handout on Blackboard), and he lists those things that

provoke sublime reactions. His text becomes significant in the rise of Gothic art and literature as is

offers artists and writers an index to the elements of the sublime.

Charlotte Smith, “Beachy Head” (1807) (pp. 122-141) extracts are available on Blackboard

S. T. Coleridge, “Chamouny; the Hour Before Sunrise. A Hymn” (pp. 677-679)

Percy Shelley, “Mont Blanc” (pp. 1075-1079)

The poems by Smith, Coleridge and Shelley offer three different poetic approaches to the sublime.

Charlotte Smith’s poem (very long, we looked at the extract on BB) opens with a sublime perception

of the landscape/seascape. The speaker looks out from Beachy Head across the English Channel

towards France and wonders at the awesome geological events that wrenched Briton from the

mainland continent. She imagines this as one hardly imaginable catastrophic event occurring in the

deep past.

As the poem moves on, however, she begins to include the tiniest elements of nature in her vision

(birds, flowers, insects), as well as human history, but not just human history, she notes the fossils that

make up the cliff on which she reclines and speculates on the sublime pre-history of the world. The

poem offers an all-encompassing vision of the world – a sublime view that dwarfs the individual,

while it celebrates nature and humanity.

S. T. Coleridge, “Chamouny; the Hour Before Sunrise. A Hymn”, has a very different approach tothe sublime. Here the speaker‟s encounter with the mountain is expressed as a religious experience.The mountain moves the speaker to think of the sublime power of God and this in turn brings him to

tears: “I lift again my head bowed low/ In adoration, I again behold,/ And to thy summit upward fromthy base/ with dim eyes suffused by tears”. The mountain works on the speaker‟s „soul‟ through the

language of the sublime. Note the series of questions the speaker poses, they are similar to Blake‟s inhis poem “Tyger;” – they ask unanswerable questions. Notice also the paradox of motion and stillness

in the poem.

Percy Shelley, “Mont Blanc” –  a really good poem to contrast with Coleridges‟ (although Wusuggests it should be read with Wordsworth‟s “Tintern Abbey”) as Shelley, while addressing themountain with awe, does not feel the same religious sentiments as Coleridge. There is also a paradox

in the peom in the treatment of stillness and motion, as in Coleridge. This, again, is a sublime

encounter, however, here Shelley has a more political agenda. The voice of the mountain dwafs

human laws and religious dogma, and in this sense the sublime has the potential of freeing people

from the oppression of human society, but, in Shelley‟s rhetoric, only the wise, the great and the goodcan interpret the voice of the mountain –  it‟s an exclusive lesson the the mountain teaches.... 

The last part of this poem is very interesting as Shelley asks –  (I‟m paraphrasing here) “What is nature,

if to human imagination silence and solitude equal nothing, equal vacancy?” The implication is thatwithout the human imagination nature is nothing – it is the eye that percieves the mountain, not the

mountain, that‟s important (you can see the connection with Wordsworth‟s poem here). The speaker‟smind, thus, assimilates the mountain and rationalises, to some extent, the sublime experience.

General question about such an approach:

If a tree falls down in the forest, and there are no people or animals around, does it make a noise?

Aha ! Got you there!