In one of my favourite classes in 18th-century English literature, I tell my students the following:
Imagine it is night. You are in a small boat in the middle of the wide empty ocean. There is a storm that makes the sky roar. Strikes of lightning brighten the night in flashes. The waves gasp and almost engulf the little boat you are in. The full moon reigns solemn above it all.
Now, how do you feel?
Can you see how paradoxically terrifying and beautiful this scene is? How majestic the force of nature is, and her relentless power, and how insignificant you as a human being are in comparison? How the closeness of death makes you feel more alive?
Now that, dear reader, is the sublime.
The sublime is a very important concept to understand 18th-century literature (as well as art, philosophy and politics of the time).
The Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote an aesthetic treatise on the sublime, published in 1757 as A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He argues that our ideas and our knowledge of the world are shaped by our senses - and not by reason. The sublime, specifically, refers to an experience that is so majestic and so overwhelmingly powerful that the rational human mind cannot grasp it. It is a paradoxical combination of awe, fear and beauty.
An iconic visual representation of a sublime experience is the painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich. This painting is usually mentioned when the subject is the sublime. Look at it:
Look at the age-old mountains, the trees on the cliffs, the mysterious mist that covers the horizon. At the edge of a precipice, the man is confronted with the magnitude of nature, which in turn makes him aware of his own fragility and mortality. What is the lifespan of a human being in comparison with nature?
Encounters with nature are a way to experience the sublime. There are, at least, three other ways that have been explored by artists to get in contact with the sublime. The first one is ruins. Do you ever feel the urge to touch an ancient building? To imagine all the people that have touched those same walls, walked those same paths, and whose voices have sounded in those same corridor? People who no longer exist, but whose presence (or, rather, absence) ghostly haunt the physical space you are now occupying. Ruins are a material connection with the past; stones that withstood the test of time create a bridge between past and present. They also emphasise the mortality of flesh and bone in comparison with the lasting brick and mortar. The second manner to experience the sublime is through religion or faith. The divine is beyond human comprehension and exists on a level beyond the mundane. Thus, in the awe-inspiring presence of God or a higher spiritual being (a presence we both desire and fear), such as in a church or a temple, we are confronted with the complex feelings of terror and reverence. And, finally, a third way to encounter the sublime is through terror. The 18th-century Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe believed in the superiority of terror (psychological, suggested) over horror (physical, explicit), a notion she explores in her novels. She also suggested that the experience of terror, that which “expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life”, as she puts it in “On the Supernatural in Poetry”, is a source of the sublime. When the lines between the natural and the supernatural, or between the real and the imagined, are crossed, we are faced with embodiments of our deepest fears and desires. This encounter with your subconscious can be deeply transcendental.
What about poetry?
Romantic poets frequently explored the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the sublime. They saw it as a source of inspiration and transcendence, capable of stirring the deepest emotions and connecting individuals to something greater than themselves.
One poet from the Romantic period that I greatly admire is the not very known Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Barbauld's poetry often celebrates the beauty of nature and explores the emotional responses it evokes on the reader. She frequently employs vivid imagery and sensory language to evoke the sights, sounds, and sensations of the natural world. Let’s take a look at her fabulous poem “A Summer Evening’s Meditation”, first published in 1773. It is a long poem that describes the lyrical voice’s meditative state inspired by the fall of the evening, when “Nature’s self is hushed, / And, but a scattered leaf, which rustles through / The thick-wove foliage, not a sound is heard / To break the midnight air”. It is the moment for contemplative silence. She writes:
How deep the silence, yet how loud the praise!
At this ideal moment for meditation, in contact with nature, the self turns inwards and finds the divine within. Looking at the stars, the moon, and appreciating nature’s hushed presence, are a way to connect with a superior being, with God or whatever you wish to call this divine power. Facing the grandiosity of God’s creation, the lyrical voice goes on an imaginary journey - a mental journey, leaving the mortal body behind. She roams through the cosmos, beyond Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (the “end” of the solar system as Barbauld would know it. Uranus was discovered n 1781), struck with wonder. It is a sublime experience.
Until it is time for her to return to her mortal body. It is not yet her time to uncover the mysteries of the universe or the afterlife. This is how the poem ends:
But now my soul unus'd to stretch her powers
In flight so daring, drops her weary wing,
And seeks again the known accustom'd spot, Drest up with sun, and shade, and lawns, and streams,
A mansion-fair and spacious for its guest,
And full replete with wonders. Let me here
Content and grateful, wait th' appointed time
And ripen for the skies: the hour will come
When all these splendours bursting on my sight
Shall stand unveil'd, and to my ravish'd sense
Unlock the glories of the world unknown.
Seeking the sublime
What about seeking encounters with the sublime yourself?
Next time there is a storm or you find yourself at a spot where nature thrives without human intervention, think of the sublime. Explore the paradoxical feelings of beauty, fear and awe. Find the divine in nature and the divine within you. Feel grand, feel small. Feel part of the web of relationships that form the universe. Feel what inspired Romantic writers such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld.
Read.
Write.
Feel.