Coleridge’s Conception of the Sublime

Abstract

Some of Coleridge’s most important statements on the sublime appear in his marginalia to Herder’s Kalligone, and this is a good place to begin an analysis of his views.²⁴ For Coleridge, Herder’s definition of the sublime was imprecise and faulty. Herder, he complained, ‘mistakes for the Sublime sometimes the Grand, sometimes the Majestic, sometimes the Intense’, without realizing that a visual whole as such ‘cannot be sublime’.²⁵ Thus, ‘A Mountain in a cloudless sky, its summit … hidden by clouds and seemingly blended with the sky, while mists and floating vapours encompass it, is sublime’.²⁶ Elsewhere Coleridge provided a literary illustration which sheds further light on his objection to Herder’s confused use of the term sublime. He argued that the description of the Messiah in Milton’s lines ‘Onward he moved / And thousands of his saints around’ is marked by ‘grandeur, but it is grandeur without completeness’. However, when Milton adds the line ‘Far off their coming shone’, he achieves the ‘highest sublime. There is total completeness. So I would say that the Saviour praying on the Mountain, the Desert on one hand, the Sea on the other, the City at an immense distance below, was sublime. But I should say of the Saviour looking towards the City, his countenance full of piety, that he was majestic, and of the situation that it was grand.’²⁷