ABSTRACT
The mind 'blocked' in confronting a multiplicity or vastness too much to comprehend: such a moment seems to have become so inseparable from the idea of the sublime that asking why, and how, takes an imaginative effort. Neil Hertz makes that effort here, in a study that examines how sublime scenarios operate in theoretical and historio-graphical writing as well as in poetry. In Hertz's reading, a critical or theoretical text illuminates a poetic text not chiefly through what it says about it but in so far as it does the same thing, or some of the same things. In each of these passages in The Prelude and in eighteenth and twentieth century theoretical or critical writing the dominant version of the sublime serves to represent as an experience of a self what other aspects of the portrayal of the sublime suggest is rather a discontinuity or 'difficulty' intrinsic to a process, that of interpretation or reading.
