1. The imagination, the sublime and the beautiful
EN227 Romantic and Victorian poetry 2017–2018

2. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

3. Longinus, On the Sublime
(1st century AD)

4. On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime! 
That o’er the channel reared, half way at sea 
The mariner at early morning hails, 
I would recline; while Fancy should go forth, 
And represent the strange and awful hour 
Of vast concussion;
—Charlotte Smith, ‘Beachy Head’, lines 1–6

7. Imagination, which in truth
Is but another name for absolute strength
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind
And reason in her most exalted mood.
—Wordsworth, The Prelude, book 13,

8. The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary
The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.

9. FANCY, on the contrary has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by, that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
—Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)

10. SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY

11. Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. [ ] When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.
—Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry

12. after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
—Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 1, lines 390–397

13. The other shape,
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joynt, or limb,
Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d
For each seem’ed either; black it stood as Night
Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 2, 666–670

14. The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected; the result being what the poet wishes to express, namely, the substitution of a sublime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image.
—Coleridge, lecture 1811

15. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764)

20. The glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have pil’d: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, tthat from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream
—Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’, lines 100–109

21. Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain;
Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’, lines127–132

22. Ah! hills so early loved! in fancy still
I breathe your pure keen air; and still behold
Those widely spreading views, mocking alike
The Poet and the Painter’s utmost art,
And still, observing objects more minute,
Wondering remark the strange and foreign forms
Of sea-shells; with the pale calcareous soil
Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance.
Charlotte Smith, ‘Beachy Head’, lines 368–75