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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... poet . He was so taken by the eloquence of his defense that he recorded it years later ( probably 1815 ) in the form of an " Apologetic Preface , " and then published it in his Sibylline Leaves ( 1817 ) .39 For the poem was in fact his ...
... Poet indeed , as great a Poet as ever lived in any age or country ; but his poetic images were so vivid , that they mastered the Poet's own mind ! He was possessed with them , as with substances distinct from himself : LUTHER did not ...
... poet - medium " is really " there all the time . " What the poet loses in explicit presence he gains in an implicit mag- nification of consciousness : " In so subtly eliding the human intermediary , Wordsworth evokes a state of ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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