ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will look closely at the work of the political philosopher, pamphleteer, and Whig Member of Parliament Edmund Burke, whose aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published anonymously in 1757, has had a massive and lasting impact on discussion of the sublime. That Burke’s Enquiry far exceeded, in terms of scope and intellectual acuity, the outpourings of previous writers on this topic is manifest as soon as we consider the working relation to its closest competitor, John Baillie’s An Essay on the Sublime (1747). As outlined in the previous chapter, in Baillie’s work we reach the point where the contradictory nature of the sublime falls into crisis. Having determined that the sublime is a function of the combinatory power of language, and not merely a quality inherent in certain words and objects, or for that matter in the divine, the stress begins to fall on ways of accounting for this phenomenon.
