Longinus’ on the Sublime and the Role of the Creative Imagination

Abstract

The Neoclassical battle over the importance of the ancients or the moderns is well over, but our awareness of the influence of Aristotle’s Poetics as still the most quoted authoritative source in critical theoretizing on literature is unfailing. To invoke Aristotle is to invoke the main classical document concerning the ever-present questions of literary genres, values or imitative qualities of a text. Moreover, to quote any other classical texts of literary criticism usually means still staying within the mainstream of largely Aristotelian thinking. An exception to this rule is the treatise On the Sublime by Longinus, written in the first century A.D. However, it is rather rare to quote Longinus now, even though his work was popularized by Neoclassical critics and poets (for example, Pope) and then elevated in the nineteenth century as a “source of authoritative encouragement” (Bate 62) for the European romantic writers, who stressed new critical methods and values.