1. The imagination, the sublime, and the beautiful
Prof Emma Mason

2. Sublime and beautiful – Edmund Burke
Charlotte Smith
Wordsworth and Burke
Sublime and delight
Sublime and obscurity
Shelley and Kant’s sublime
Domestic sublime – Smith and Wordsworth

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

4. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
Longinus, On the Sublime
(1st century AD)

5. 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

8. 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,

9. 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.
—Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)

10. 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 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

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

18. Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind.
Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’, lines 97–100

19. 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

20. It was a close, warm, breezeless summer night,
… we began to climb
The mountain-side. The mist soon girt us round,
And … pensively we sank
Each into commerce with his private thoughts:
by myself … Was nothing either seen or heard that checked
Those musings or diverted, save that once
The shepherd's lurcher, who, among the crags,
Had to his joy unearthed a hedgehog, teased
His coiled-up prey with barkings turbulent.
This small adventure, for even such it seemed
In that wild place and at the dead of night,
Being over and forgotten, on we wound
In silence as before …
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten …
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash, and lo! as I looked up,
The Moon hung naked in a firmament
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 14, 1798/1805/1850