The Sublime in Nature: From Burke to the Romantics

Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, first published anonymously in 1757 and issued in a revised second edition under his own name in 1759, gave the eighteenth century its most influential systematic account of the sublime as a category distinct from, and opposed to, the beautiful. Where Burke locates the beautiful in qualities such as smallness, smoothness, delicacy, and gradual variation — qualities that provoke love and sociable affection — he locates the sublime in obscurity, vastness, infinity, magnificence, and above all power, qualities that provoke astonishment and a kind of pleasurable terror he calls "delightful horror." For Burke this response is rooted in the instinct of self-preservation: the sublime object suggests danger or pain without actually inflicting it, producing a state of mind he distinguishes from ordinary pleasure by the technical term "delight." Burke's Enquiry proved enormously influential well beyond aesthetics narrowly conceived, shaping later eighteenth-century debates on taste, landscape gardening, and painting, and it remains the text against which nearly every later theory of the natural sublime, including Kant's, positions itself.