Blitz Sublime

Abstract

A mode of terror, or of pain, is always the cause of the sublime.¹

This short sentence from Edmund Burke expresses one of the key notions from one of the key documents of early English Romanticism. In establishing the Sublime as a state of feeling higher than beauty, Burke not only foresaw — if not quite invented — the whole idea of Romantic angst and the frissson as ultimate experience, but also stressed that feature which marks out Romantic aesthetics from all that had gone before: now it is the feelings which are the subjective judge in matters of art, not any apparently objective canons of taste. He continues:

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 of which the mind is capable of feeling.²