The sublime stands as a philosophical concept that has been greatly important in the realms of literature and art for several hundred years. Ever since Edmund Burke posited that the dual experiences of terror and joy stand as the founding concept of the sublime, artists and writers have tried to capture the essence of the sublime experience in their own works. Often, the terror of the sublime is felt as a helplessness in the face of nature (imagine a picture of a boat about to be engulfed by a massive wave) or the uncanny and transcendent experience of emotions aimed at in Romantic literature. Meanwhile, joy often occurs in the serenity of a pastoral landscape, or the comfort of a loved one’s embrace.
In the British literary tradition, the sublime might be best exemplified in William Wordsworth’s unique attempts to convey the experience of joy and beauty through poetry. His “Lines Composed A few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” although not conventionally terrifying, is often said to be so full of emotion that it transcends merely words on a page, instead providing a somewhat awe-inducing slew of emotions, emotions that can never be contained, but rather spill over, ungraspable yet intoxicating in their own right.
In American literature, the sublime can be best associated with the transcendentalists, who, encountering the sublime in nature, attempted to create a literary identity founded on this experience. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the father of American Transcendentalism, offers a striking example of sublime literature in his famous essay “On Nature,” where he introduces the terrifying metaphor of the translucent eyeball. Emerson’s eyeball looks out at the world and sees beauty and terror in many forms, yet none of these experiences occlude one another. Everything can be felt at the same time; all of nature's inexhaustible plenitude is present at once to the viewer (the "translucent eyeball"), who both observes it and is a part of it. For the transcendentalists, spiritual enlightenment comes from the sublime, occurring at the crossroads of joy and terror, of beauty and pain. But it also comes in the realization that terror and beauty can never be fully grasped: the sublime, like the wind of Rossetti’s poem, flees from us, and this ephemerality marks it as something transcendent and worthy of poetry.
