Personification and the Sublime: Milton to ColeridgeEighteenth-century and Romantic readers had a peculiar habit of calling personified abstractions "sublime." This has always seemed mysterious, since the same readers so often expressed a feeling that there was something wrong with turning ideas into people--or, worse, turning people into ideas. In this wide-ranging, carefully argued study, Steven Knapp explains the connection between personification and the aesthetics of the sublime. Personifications, such as Milton's controversial figures of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost, were seen to embody a unique combination of imaginative power and overt fictionality, and these, Knapp shows, were exactly the conflicting requirements of the sublime in general. He argues that the uneasiness readers felt toward sublime personifications was symptomatic of broader ambivalences toward archaic beliefs, political and religious violence, and poetic fiction as such. Drawing on recent interpretations of Romanticism, allegory, and the sublime, Knapp provides important new readings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Kant, and William Collins. His provocative thesis sheds new light on the relationship between Romanticism and the eighteenth century. |
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... Milton hid the Poetry in or transformed ( not transubstantiated ) the Po- etry into the objectivity while ... Milton's characters derives from their " exceeding propriety . " 35 The difference , as Coleridge reveals in still later ...
Milton to Coleridge Steven Knapp. riety of agents ( compared to the Iliad , the Aeneid was rather barren in this regard ) , but the nature of Milton's subject im- posed an extraordinary limitation : only two human beings were available ...
... Milton by the Late S. T. Coleridge ( London , 1856 ) , p . 64 . 2. Both arguments are ultimately Aristotelian ; see ... Milton's description with the instability of perception , see The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge , ed ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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