ABSTRACT
The history of English Romanticism does not yield a defining moment of reversal in the upward trajectory of sublime analytics, an irremediable turn, that is, from the ether of transcendent heights to the familiar embrace of home. Indeed, as I have already suggested, experiences of mountaintop and quotidian sublimity exist side by side in the literature of the period. Nevertheless, there are intimations, as early as the 1790s, of a longing to move both physically and imaginatively into those spaces or spots, as Coleridge notes, “with which the heart associates.” According to Linda Marie Brooks, the reason for this retreat from natural magnitude and grandeur may have to do with the deleterious effects of such sublime encounters on the integrity of the Romantic self. Distinguishing between the positive or teleological sublime of Burke, which in a sense rescues the overawed subject by establishing a participatory relationship between it and the divine presence that underlies all supernature, and the negative sublime of Kant, which posits an outright failure of the imagination to conceptualize the transcendent object, Brooks claims that Romantic accounts of sublimity are typically negative in nature, tending rather to undermine than gird the self by threatening it with an unfathomable excess of meaning (2). While acknowledging that Kant does in the end restore power and efficacy to the subject through the intervention of reason, a faculty “which can contain the sky, indeed the universe, as a grain of sand” (22), Brooks nevertheless emphasizes the failure of the imagination to body forth this contained infinitude as a sensible image or concept. Weiskel's reading of Kantian aesthetics likewise maintains that “there can be no sublime moment without the implicit, dialectical endorsement of human limitations” (44). While this discursive shift to human finitude and the frustration of the Romantic imagination appears to yield a plausible explanation for the emergence of an alternate sublime aesthetic, the relationship between mountaintop and quotidian sublimity is, as I will suggest, rather more vexed.
