Sublime Flashcards
What is Tintern abbey on one level?
An exploration of the sublime and beautiful
Edmund Burke
Made distinction between beauty and sublime
What was beauty according to Burke?
Continuity and connectedness
- vegetables are not sublime but beautiful because they are constant and continuous
The sublime according to Burke
Needs deep distances with drawbacks and chasms
- a potent otherness, depending on privations
As Wordsworth stands in his imagination high above the river and under his dark sycamore in a trance of otherness
He is on the lip of Burke’s sublime world
Why is the poem revolutionary
Blurred the boundaries of the beautiful and the sublime
- replaces them with a third category the Wordsworthian
‘Something far more deeply interfused’ as sublime and beautiful- what is it?
Not as part of the ordinary continuities of vegetable life, yet does not depend on the dis-continuities of the sublime
- occupies the space usually occupied by the sublime
- realm of great privations
- has all aspects of beautiful , with governing characteristics of live not fear
- new understanding of what truth and beauty might be
New understanding of what truth and beauty might be
Beauty occupying the place of the sublime as cosmic, universal and profoundly mysterious sense of love and oneness
- everything is deeply interfused, boundaries not clear and substance is uncertain
What is Wordsworth great full for
As a living and embodied person he is embedded in the world of sense, leading him towards a modesty and wisdom which effectively bury his heart, mind and self in the enveloping and tender folds of ‘this green earth’
‘The mighty world’
Political turmoil
- Tintern abbey claims nature - meadows, woods and mountains is the still mightier world that embodies and enshrines the world of the senses and of love
‘Thou my dearest friend’
Loves her unequivocally as he loves the universe
- thinks if her as a lesser being, immature, some way back in the path he has already travelled
What does he lecture Dorothy on?
The power of nature and its ability to inculcate loving ness
- ‘this prayer I make, knowing that nature never did betray’
What is Wordsworth’s biggest flaw?
His own sense of his own greatness - also his biggest weakness
Speaks of him and Dorothy as…
Fellow sufferers ‘we’ throughout their youth had been betrayed by the death of one parent and then another
Who were they evicted by?
The Lowthers, also refused to pay their inheritance
