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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... stands for the obligations of marriage at the same time that it partly fulfills them , Coleridge is not retreating from his claims for symbolic consubstantiality ; he is showing what he means by “ substance . " 20 Nor is he demystifying ...
... stand In sight of God enthron'd , our happy state Hold , as you yours , while our obedience holds ; On other surety none ; freely we serve , Because we freely love , as in our will To love or not ; in this we stand or fall : And some ...
... stands " close by Peter's side " ( 562 ) and looks on eagerly as Peter probes the corpse before entwining his sapling in its hair ( 556–570 ) . There are two figures , then , one of which watches as the other stirs — just as the poet in ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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