Abstract
This chapter investigates the relationship between Longinus as a mediator between Plato, Aristotle and Burke. I argue that the both the Peri Hupsous and the Philosophical Enquiry need to be read metatextually, commenting satirically on their own status as texts in an enthusiastic and ebullient manner. In order to demonstrate this strategy in action I analyse the treatises’ intertextuality, charting both Longinus and Burke’s direct and indirect use of their predecessors’ work.
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Notes
- 1.
Samuel H. Monk’s The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England first appeared in 1935, but all references here are to the revised edition: The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). His teleological reading of aesthetics, with Kant as the telos, (first stated at p. 4) is also present in B. Croce and R. G. Collingwood, “Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic,” Philosophy 9, no. 54 (1934): 157–67, 157, but has been criticised by, for example, A. Ashfield and P. de Bolla eds., in The sublime: a reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2–3, and V. L. Ryan, “The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason”, Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (2001): 265–79, 266.
- 2.
Monk, The Sublime, 25.
- 3.
The two references are in the preface to the first edition and E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1958), 51. cf. xliv, no. 1. The other edition consulted is Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
- 4.
cf. Emma Gilby, Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (London: Legenda, 2006), 31, especially on Plato and Longinus’ differing views on the cognitive aspects of poetry.
- 5.
This emphasis on structure and process entails a necessary reduction in the discussion of other aspects. For the sake of clarity and concision, only the immediately relevant context for Burke’s Philosophial Enquiry is included. A more extensive treatment of eighteenth-century texts and their interrelations and reviews would provide a fascinating way to take this approach further. T. R. Henn, Longinus and English Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), provides an extensive summary of texts influenced by Longinus. His focus is mainly on the ‘rules’, but he describes rather than analyses the correspondences between texts.
- 6.
Monk, The Sublime, 10.
- 7.
D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom eds., Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 460. For a discussion of the lacunae, cf. ‘Longinus’ On the Sublime, edited, with Introduction and Commentary by D. A. Russell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), on each point in the text, and R. Macksey, “Longinus Reconsidered,” MLN 108 (1993): 913–34, 915.
- 8.
E.g. Longinus On the sublime: the Peri Hupsous translated by William Smith, in the Introduction. Most modern commentators no longer consider this to be the case. The title page attributes it to Dionysius Longinus, the first page to Dionysius or Longinus. Whether it was Dionysius of Halicarnassus, or another first century Longinus, is also disputed. The author appears to have had connections with both the Jewish and the Roman world, was well educated, and wrote in Greek. The text is addressed to one Postumius Terentianus whose identity is also not clear and so cannot help us. On Terentianus, cf. W. R. Roberts, “The Greek Treatise on the Sublime: Its Authorship,” JHS 17 (1897): 189–211, 209; W. B. Sedgwick, “Sappho in ‘Longinus’ (X, 2, Line 13),” American Journal of Philology 69, no. 2 (1948): 197–200, 199; Russell and Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism, 461. For further discussion of authorship, cf. W. R. Roberts, “The Greek Treatise on the Sublime: Its Modern Interest,” JHS 17 (1897): 176–188; Roberts, “The Greek Treatise,” 190; Roberts, “The Quotation from ‘Genesis’ in the ‘De Sublimitate’ (IX.9),” The Classical Review 11, no. 9 (1897): 431–36, 433; M. J. Boyd, “Longinus, the ‘Philological Discourses’, and the Essay ‘On the Sublime’,” Classical Quarterly 7 (1957): 39–46; J. Brody, Boileau and Longinus (Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1958), 9, no. 1; Russell, ‘Longinus’ On the Sublime, xxii–xxx; Russell and Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism, 461; P. le Huray, “The Role of Music in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 105 (1978–1979): 90–99, 96; Macksey, “Longinus Reconsidered,” 913, 915; D. E. Cox, “A Quotation from On the Sublime,” (1996) online at http://web.ncf.ca/co776/newfirma1.pdf (accessed April 18, 2008); T. Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 57; contra these, M. Heath, “Longinus, On Sublimity,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 45 (1999): 43–74, supports the idea of a third century Longinus, also noted in Whitmarsh, Greek Literature 57, no. 69. It is important to note that as a result of the author’s anonymity, however, we cannot credit him with a precise cultural context. I argue for a certain awareness of Aristotle, and of several Latin texts, but, in his probable peripatetic context, it is impossible to prove this beyond reasonable doubt. Consequently I have not discussed his immediate context in any detail.
- 9.
cf. Roberts, “The Greek Treatise,” 176, 189; M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 74; Brody, Boileau and Longinus, 9; Monk, The Sublime, 18; Macksey, “Longinus Reconsidered,” 913, 925; Cox, “A Quotation”. Macksey dates the Manutius edition to 1554, B. Weinberg, “Translations and Commentaries of Longinus, On The Sublime, to 1600: A Bibliography,” Modern Philology 47, no. 3 (1950): 145–51, 147–1555. That Manutius was probably unaware of the Robortello edition is discussed by Brody, Boileau and Longinus, 9.
- 10.
Brody, Boileau and Longinus, 12; Monk, The Sublime, 18, comments: ‘One would expect to find in England during the last half of the sixteenth century some traces of the interest that was being manifested in Longinus by Continental humanists, but one looks for them in vain.’
- 11.
Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 74; Monk, The Sublime, 20; R. Terry, “The Rhapsodical Manner in the Eighteenth Century,” The Modern Language Review 87, no. 2 (1992): 273–85, 276; T. J. B. Spencer, “Longinus in English Criticism: Influences before Milton,” The Review of English Studies VIII, no. 30 (1930): 137–43, 141, offers a history of Longinian reception before Milton; Weinberg, “Translations and Commentaries,” offers a summary of texts and translations before 1600. Gilby, Sublime Worlds, argues persuasively for the more general importance of Longinus and the term ‘sublime’ in seventeenth-century French literature, before Boileau.
- 12.
Monk, The Sublime, 22.
- 13.
cf. Monk, The Sublime, 21. He notes just two different eighteenth-century Greek editions, those of J. Hudson (Oxford, 1710) and Z. Pearce (London, 1724) printed and reprinted in 1710, 1718, 1724,1730, 1732, 1733, 1743, 1751, 1752, 1762, 1763, 1773, 1778, 1789. There was also an edition by Toup published at Oxford in 1778.
- 14.
Henn, Longinus, 10; Monk, The Sublime, 19; Macksey, “Longinus Reconsidered,” 925.
- 15.
cf. Boulton’s edition of the Philosophical Enquiry, xliv–xlv; White, “Burke on Politics,” 510. Brody, Boileau and Longinus, 18, notes the continuing usefulness of Boileau’s edition for those without Greek.
- 16.
The relationship between rhetoric and sublimity will not be considered further here. For discussion of the relationship between Quintilian, Cicero and Longinus, cf. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 150–51, 290; Brody, Boileau and Longinus, 16; Monk, The Sublime, chap. 1; S. Guerlac, “Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime,” New Literary History 16, no. 2 (1985): 275–89, 275; Terry, “The Rhapsodical Manner”; Macksey, “Longinus Reconsidered”; G. Sircello, “How Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 4 (1993): 541–50; Ashfield and de Bolla, The sublime, 10; H. Caplan, R. L. Enos et al., “The Classical Tradition: Rhetoric and Oratory,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 27, no. 2 (1997): 7–38.
- 17.
cf. S. Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1986), 310.
- 18.
cf. Monk, The Sublime, 25, 47; Macksey, “Longinus Reconsidered,” 926–27.
- 19.
cf. Roberts, “The Greek Treatise,” 177, Russell, Longinus on the Sublime, ix; W. Jackson, “Affective Values in Later Eighteenth Century Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24, no. 2 (1965): 309–14, 309; J. Lamb, “The Comic Sublime and Sterne’s Fiction,” ELH 48, no. 1 (1981): 110–43, 110, for example.
- 20.
Monk, The Sublime, 24.
- 21.
In this article I focus solely on Plato and Aristotle, leaving Latin literature aside.
- 22.
Henn, Longinus and English Criticism, 11.
- 23.
Russell and Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism, xv.
- 24.
On Longinus and the reduction of rules, cf. P. Goodman, “Neo-Classicism, Platonism, and Romanticism,” The Journal of Philosophy 31, no. 6 (1934): 148–63, 149; Brody, Boileau and Longinus, 100–41; Monk, The Sublime, 15, 26; Lamb, “The Comic Sublime,” 139.
- 25.
He is criticised for his lack of definition. Cf. Dennis quoted in Ashfield and de Bolla, The sublime, 34, 36, for example. William Smith’s 1739 translation of this section is noteworthy: ‘the Sublime is an image reflected from the inward greatness of the soul’ (pp. 28–29). He changes the metaphor from that of echo to image, which raises the issue of the eighteenth-century understanding of imitation and mimesis. A thorough investigation of Plato and Aristotle would be needed to explain such translations, offering another way in which a good understanding and close reading of the ancient texts would help to enrich our understanding of the eighteenth-century ones.
- 26.
The other reference is in the preface, as noted above.
- 27.
See Boulton’s edition of Philosophical Enquiry, p. xli. cf. also Ryan, “The Physiological Sublime,” 274. For further discussion on Burke and Locke, cf. D. Townsend, “Lockean Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59, no. 4 (1991): 349–61; F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998): i.92–93. This state of indifference is reminiscent of Epicurean ataraxia. While Epicureanism is not the focus of this article, some links will be made with Lucretius, so it is useful to note further Epicurean aspects of Burke’s treatise.
- 28.
G. May, “Diderot and Burke: A Study in Aesthetic Affinity,” PMLA 75, no. 5 (1960): 527–39, 530.
- 29.
It is striking that the Philosophical Enquiry is in five sections, only the last of which is overtly concerned with words and rhetorical strategy. This could perhaps be interpreted as an indirect allusion to Longinus’ five-part structure, which also finishes with words.
- 30.
On the structure of the Peri Hupsous in relation to this programmatic section, cf. D. A. Russell, “Longinus Revisited,” Mnemosyne XXXIV.1–2 (1981): 72–86; D. C. Innes, “Longinus: Structure and Unity,” in Ancient Literary Criticism, ed. A. Laird (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 300–12.
- 31.
All translations of Longinus are taken from Russell and Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism.
- 32.
This is noted by Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 65.
- 33.
Russell and Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism, 486–87.
- 34.
Russell and Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism, 482, no. 2 also notes this point.
- 35.
Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 985–90, in Pope, Selected Poetry, ed. P. Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
- 36.
The Pope apostrophe of Longinus is quoted or discussed at, for example: Smith’s 1739 translation of Longinus, title page; Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 74; Monk, The Sublime, 3, 22 (attributing the cliché to Boileau); Macksey, “Longinus Reconsidered,” 913. On the importance of the Essay on Criticism in general, cf. Roger’s introduction in Pope, Selected Poetry, xxii: ‘An Essay on Criticism (1711) was quite simply the most brilliant, audacious, and witty act of poetry that England has ever seen – perhaps it still is.’
- 37.
Lamb, “The Comic Sublime,” 124.
- 38.
His The Advancement & Reformation of Poetry (1701) and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) are also important in reflecting Longinian views, especially over the role of passions in poetry. cf. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 74–75; Monk, The sublime, 46; Ashfield and de Bolla, The sublime. References to The Grounds of Criticism are to the 1718 edition in The Select works of Mr John Dennis, vol.ii.
- 39.
Monk, The Sublime, 44, 45.
- 40.
This play opened on 6th January 1717, at Drury Lane, and had the longest consecutive night run in the theatre that season (seven nights). It commented on the idea of innate genius and passions as a source of the poetic. cf. Macksey, “Longinus Reconsidered,” 927. cf. also B. Hathaway, “The Lucretian ‘Return Upon Ourselves’ in Eighteenth-Century Theories of Tragedy,” PMLA 62 (1947): 672–89, 675; Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 74; Monk, The Sublime, 47; Terry, “The Rhapsodical Manner,” 276.
- 41.
Terry, “The Rhapsodical Manner,” 279. On Milton as a sublime English author, see below.
- 42.
On its Longinian inspiration, cf. Lamb, “The Comic Sublime,” 110, who notes the apparent contradiction of the Peri Hupsous both inspiring Pope and being travestied by him. On the familiarity with the Peri Hupsous which the Peri Bathous presupposes, cf. Monk, The Sublime, 23. He quotes Swift (1733) On Poetry a Rhapsody to demonstrate how Longinus had become so popular as to become populist: ‘A forward Critick often dupes us / With sham Quotations Peri Hupsous: / And if we have not read Longinus, / Will magisterially out-shine us. / Then lest with Greek he over-run ye, / Procure the book for love and money, / Translated from Boileau’s translation, / And quote quotation on quotation.’ cf. also A. F. B. Clark, Boileau and the French classical critics in England (1660–1830) (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 367–68.
- 43.
Alexander Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope Esq., 9 vols., with notes and illustrations by Joseph Warton, D.D. and others (London, 1797), v.241.
- 44.
The editor of the 1797 version here quoted failed to see the comedy of this self-reflexive satire in his remark to chap. XIII, “Of Expression, and the Several Sorts of Style of the Present Age”. Pope comments that bathetic poetry need not always be grammatical, and writes ‘For example, sometimes use the wrong Number; The Sword and Pestilence at once devours, instead of devour. Sometimes the wrong Case; And who more fit to sooth the God than thee? instead of thou’ to which the editor remarks: ‘Our author himself has more than once fallen into this faulte, as hath been observed, in the notes of this edition, and of which Dr. Lowth in his Grammar mentions many instances’. Pope, Works, v.249, and note i. On Longinus’ periphrasis and English literary criticism more generally, cf. Henn, Longinus and English Criticism, 58–60.
- 45.
Lamb, “The Comic Sublime,” 139.
- 46.
At iii.ix Burke quotes Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination I.360–76 (accurately), and at iii.xxviii he quotes Pope’s Essay on Man II.213–14 (inaccurately). Note that this is in the part dealing with beauty and not sublimity. A full chart of Burke’s quotations is included below.
- 47.
Lock, Burke, i.52.
- 48.
Lock, Burke, i.48.
- 49.
For the theoretical background to such an intertextual reading of Latin and Greek literature, cf. C. Martindale, Redeeming the text: Latin and the hermeneutics of reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and S. Hinds, Allusion and intertext: dynamics of appropriation in Roman poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual, ed. A. Sharrock and H. Morales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) gives a range of approaches to understanding intratextuality, that is, an author’s use of references to create allusion within a text itself rather than between texts.
- 50.
Gilby, Sublime Worlds, 4, 12.
- 51.
Gilby, Sublime Worlds, 5.
- 52.
Gilby, Sublime Worlds, 21.
- 53.
J. L. Mahoney, “The Classical Tradition in Eighteenth Century English Rhetorical Education,” History of Education Journal 9, no. 4 (1958): 93. Lock, Burke, 36, notes the syllabus as including, in Latin: Virgil, Terence, Juvenal, Caesar, Justin, Horace, Cicero, Livy, Tacitus; in Greek: Homer Iliad, Xenophon Memorabilia, Cyropaedia, Epictetus, Tabula of Cebes, two plays of Sophocles, selections from Lucian, some Aeschines and Demosthenes, Longinus.
- 54.
cf. May, “Diderot and Burke,” 528, no. 8.
- 55.
For my purpose here, I have discounted the vaguest references to authors, such as when at XXV.1, Longinus comments of the point in question (the use of the historic present) that Thucydides uses it particularly often.
- 56.
cf. Roberts, “The Greek Treatise,” 179.
- 57.
Iliad 4.440ff, Shield of Heracles 267, Iliad 5.770–72.
- 58.
His longest passage under discussion is also from Demosthenes. At XVI.2 he quotes Demosthenes 18.208 and discusses it at length, for its use of oaths. I have already commented on the metaliterary nature of Longinus’ treatment of Demosthenes in his section on hyperbaton at Peri Hupsous XXII.3–4.
- 59.
They are: Iliad XI.369, 12.200, XX in general, XXIII.335–60, XXIV in general, XXIV.80; Odyssey XX.35 and XXII in general.
- 60.
Sophocles: 1452a (OT), 1453b (OT), 1454a (Tyro, Tereus, OT), 1460a (OT, Electra). Euripides: 1452b (Orestes & IT), 1454a (IT), 1455a (IT), 1458a (Philoctetes), 1461a (Medea, Orestes).
- 61.
Hinds, Allusion and intertext, 1–16, discusses the potential for allusions and intertexts to be read as commentary, using the term ‘Alexandrian footnote’.
- 62.
The sheer volume of Homeric citations and allusions within Plato’s writings provides evidence for the canonical status of Homer to a fourth-century audience. On the relationship between earlier forms of Greek literature and Homer, cf. R. Garner, From Homer to tragedy: the art of allusion in Greek poetry (London: Routledge, 1990) and G. Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) for example.
- 63.
Of Longinus’ conflations, Russell and Winterbottom note: ‘Illustrative quotations in common use were not necessarily exact’.
- 64.
M. Heath, “Longinus, On sublimity 35.1,” Classical Quarterly 50 (2000): 320–23, discusses the problem of Lysias as a suitable example to set against Plato. Lysias is supposed to be the flawless yet non-sublime match for Plato’s sublime genius, except that Lysias is not described as flawless, summarised at 321: ‘Longinus claims that Plato excels Lysias, who has few merits and many defects. This is not a compelling assertion of Plato’s greatness.’
- 65.
Russell and Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism, xv.
- 66.
This view contrasts with A. W. Verrall, “On Literary Association, and the Disregard of it in ‘Longinus’,” Classical Review 19, no. 4 (1905): 202–5, who feels that Longinus misses the importance of the literary resonances and potential of his quoted fragments.
- 67.
Roberts, “The Greek Treatise,” 183, begins the modern tradition of discussing Plato and Aristotle’s influence on Longinus, and he notes ‘He breathes the spirit of the Ion rather than of the Poetics.’
- 68.
See sec. IX.xi–xv.
- 69.
Roberts, “The Greek Treatise,” 195; Russell, ‘Longinus’ On the Sublime, xvii–xviii; Heath, “Longinus, On Sublimity,” 49. For an example of the influence of Latin grammar on Longinus’ Greek, cf. H. J. Edmiston, “An Unnoticed Latinism in Longinus,” The Classical Review 14 (1900): 224. Whether Longinus had any direct access to Cicero depends in part on the dating of his text, although Heath, “Longinus,” 49, argues that Cicero would have been available to Longinus in the first or third century. Caecilius of Calacte was a Greek rhetorician who worked at Rome during the reign of Augustus (d. AD 14). Only fragments of his work remain and so textual comparisons with Longinus cannot be made.
- 70.
Plutarch’s Life of Demosthenes includes a comparison with Cicero. Dryden’s translation of this was included in a 1711 multiple author edition of Plutarch’s Lives, increasing the possibility of Burke having read it, in either Greek or English; see J. Dryden, “The life of Demosthenes” in The Fifth Volume of Plutarch’s Lives. Translated from the Greek by Several Hands (London, 1711), 248–98. On Burke as engaging closely with Dryden’s translations of ancient texts (i.e. Virgil’s Georgics), cf. Lock, Burke, i.53.
- 71.
Roberts, “The Greek Treatise,” 184.
- 72.
I am working from the second edition, because Burke included a number of new quotations in this, in response to his critics, notably from Job, Ecclesiastes, Shakespeare and Milton; cf. H.A. Wichelns, “Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and its Reviewers,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology XXI (1922): 645–61,
653.
- 73.
cf. no. 45 above.
- 74.
But note that this is in fact used as a reference to Milton; cf. Lock, Burke, i.107.
- 75.
Wichelns, “Burke’s Essay,” 660–61. cf. also Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 385.
- 76.
Job 4.13–17 (NIV).
- 77.
Lock, Burke, i.114. Robert Lowth (1710–1787) published his Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum in 1753, which is around the time Burke is thought to have finished writing the Philosophical Enquiry.
- 78.
On Longinus’ quotation of Genesis, cf. Roberts, “The Greek Treatise”; G. C. Richards “The Authorship of the περι űψους,” Classical Quarterly 32 (1938): 133–34; Sircello, “How Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” 542; Cox, “A Quotation from On the Sublime”; this passage was also referred to by other eighteenth-century commentators on the sublime, for example Thomas Stackhouse, quoted in Ashfield and de Bolla, The sublime, 51–52.
- 79.
cf. Lock, Burke, i.96 & 97 on Burke’s theological outlook in general, i.112–13 on the power of the Old Testament, and i.100 for the summary comment: ‘Burke differs [from] his predecessors in founding his theory on a theological belief’.
- 80.
Cf. the next contribution by Paddy Bullard, “Burke Among the Poets: Milton, Lucretius and the Philosophical Enquiry”.
- 81.
The translation is from the 1743 T. Lucretius Carus of the nature of things, in six books. Illustrated with proper and useful notes. Adorned with Copper-Plates, curiously Guernier, and others. This edition uses two lines from Ovid as its epigraph: ‘Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti / Exitio Terras cum dabit una Dies’ (Amores I.xv.23–24). This use of ‘sublimis’ in connection with Lucretius further demonstrates the eighteenth century’s awareness of Lucretian sublimity.
- 82.
Ryan, “The Physiological Sublime,” 275.
- 83.
On Burke and Lucretius cf. Hathaway, “The Lucretian ‘Return’”. On Lucretius and the development of the sublime, cf. J. L. Porter, “Lucretius and the sublime,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. S. Gillespie and P. Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 167–84. On Latin literature and the sublime more generally, cf. C. Martindale, Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste: An Essay in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), in which chap. 4 includes a post-Kantian analysis of Lucretius.
- 84.
cf. Lock, Burke, i.118, on Burke’s intended ‘amateur’ readership.
- 85.
Different readers will spot different allusions, and will interpret different intertexts as authorially intended. The repeated patterns in Burke’s use of literature suggest that there was some authorial intention behind some allusions and intertexts. The text does not preclude a reading on which more intertexts can be read, whether put there as a conscious choice or not; indeed, the highly allusive and self-reflexive nature of the text invites this broader reading. Thus a spectrum of intentionality and reader-engagement can be constructed. Cf. Hinds, Allusion and intertext, chap. 2, on constructing a spectrum of deliberate intertexts to accidental confluence of language.
- 86.
Mahoney, “The Classical Tradition,” 94. On the general influence of Cicero and Quintilian cf. Caplan et al., “The Classical Tradition,” 28.
- 87.
I have already noted how Longinus’ use of Cicero and Demosthenes may be as much a result of his own reaction to Caecilius, but it may stretch the argument too far to suggest that Burke was aware of this and using Demosthenes and Cicero for similar reasons; here, the biographical explanation probably suffices, alongside noting the standard nature of this comparison, as seen in Plutarch, cf. note 57.
- 88.
Monk, The Sublime, 26.
- 89.
Shakespeare and Milton were commonly used by writers on the sublime, as representing the strongest challenges to the neoclassical desire for linguistic accuracy and perfection; cf. Lamb, “The Comic Sublime,” 120, and Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 309, on Shakespeare as ‘irregular’; cf. W. H. Youngren, “Addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” Modern Philology 79, no. 3 (1982): 267–83, 278 on Addison on Milton as sublime. Milton’s flawed sublimity is also discussed by Hildebrand Jacob, quoted in Ashfield and de Bolla, The sublime, 53. On Shakespeare, Milton and Dante as sublime yet imperfect, cf. Jonathan Richardson quoted in Ashfield and de Bolla, The sublime, 46–47. Leonard Welsted links Shakespeare and Milton to the word sublime in his 1712 translation of Longinus, cf. Monk, The sublime, 22. Shakespeare (Lear) and Sophocles (Oedipus) were later linked as sublime by Yeats, cf. D. N. Bandyopadhyay and R. J. Ramazani, “Tragic Joy and the Sublime,” PMLA 105, no. 2 (1990): 301–2.
- 90.
Lock, Burke, i.20–21.
- 91.
On the relationship between Burke’s work and Ireland in particular, cf. L. Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: aesthetics, politics, and the colonial sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 92.
Lock, Burke, i.45, 46.
- 93.
Lock, Burke, i.50.
- 94.
Lock, Burke, i.53, 87.
- 95.
For a summary of the evidence on the timing of the writing of the Philosophical Enquiry, cf. Lock, Burke, i.91–92.
- 96.
Thanks to Prof. Judith Mossman and Dr. Eleanor O’Kell for their help in preparing this article.
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Appendix: A Table of Burke’s Quotations in the Philosophical Enquiry
Appendix: A Table of Burke’s Quotations in the Philosophical Enquiry
Burke section | Source | Latin, Greek, Biblical or English? | Accurate? |
i.iii | Homer Iliad XXIV.480–82 | Greek | No |
i.v | Homer Odyssey IV.100–3 | Greek | Yes |
i.vi | Aristotle Poetics IV | Greek | Yes |
i.xvii | Longinus Peri Hupsous VII | Greek | Yes |
i.xix | Persius Satires V.29 | Latin | Yes |
ii.iii | Milton Paradise Lost II.666–73 | English | No |
ii.iv | Horace Ars Poetica 180–81 | Latin | Yes |
ii.iv | Milton Paradise Lost I.589–99 | English | Yes |
ii.iv | Job 4:13–17 | Biblical | Yes |
ii.v | Job 39:19b, 20b, 24 | Biblical | No |
ii.v | Job 39:5b–8a | Biblical | No |
ii.v | Job 39:9a, 10a, 11a; 41: 1a, 4, 9b | Biblical | Yes |
ii.v | Job 39: 7b–8a | Biblical | Yes |
ii.v | Psalm 139:14 | Biblical | No |
ii.v | Horace Epistles I.vi.3–5 | Latin | Yes |
ii.v | Lucretius De Rerum Natura III.28–30 | Latin | No |
ii.v. | Psalm 68:8 | Biblical | No |
ii.v | Psalm 114:7–8 | Biblical | No |
ii.v | Statius Thebaid III.661 | Latin | Yes |
ii.vi | Virgil Aeneid VI.264–69 | Latin | No |
ii.ix | Shakespeare Henry IV Part 1 IV.i.97–109 | English | No |
ii.ix | Ecclesiastes 50:5–13 | Biblical | No |
ii.xviii | Virgil Aeneid VI.270–71 | Latin | No |
ii.xviii | Spenser Faerie Queene II.vii.29 | English | No |
ii.xvii | Virgil Aeneid VII.15–18 | Latin | Yes |
ii.xxi | Virgil Aeneid VIII.81–84 | Latin | No |
ii.xxi | Virgil Aeneid VI.237–41 | Latin | Yes |
ii.xxii | Virgil Georgics III.284–85 | Latin | No |
iii.iv | Plato Gorgias 474–75 | Greek | Yes |
iii.iv | Vitruvius De Architectura III.i.3 | Latin | Yes |
iii.ix | Mark Akenside The Pleasures of the Imagination I.360–76 | English | Yes |
iii.x | Sallust Bellum Catilinae LIV | Latin | No |
iii.xxv | Milton L’Allegro 135–42 | English | No |
iii.xxv | Shakespeare Merchant of Venice V.i.69 | English | No |
iii.xxvii | Pope Essay on Man II.213–14 | English | No |
iv.xiv | Homer Iliad XVII.645–47 | Greek | Yes |
v.v | Virgil Aeneid VIII.429–32 | Latin | Yes |
v.v | Homer Iliad III.156–58 | Greek | Yes |
v.v | Spenser Faerie Queene II.iii.21–31 | English | Yes |
v.v | Lucretius De Rerum Natura I.62–67 | Latin | No |
v.vi | Horace Ars Poetica 111 | Latin | Yes |
v.vii | Virgil Aeneid II.502 | Latin | Yes |
v.vii | Milton Paradise Lost II.618–22 | English | Yes |
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Ryan, C. (2012). Burke’s Classical Heritage: Playing Games with Longinus. In: Vermeir, K., Funk Deckard, M. (eds) The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2102-9_11
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