Exploration of The Sublime

The dictionary definition of the sublime is :

sublime |səˈblīm|
adjective ( -limer , -limest )
of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe : Mozart's sublime piano concertos | [as n. ] ( the sublime) experiences that ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.
• used to denote the extreme or unparalleled nature of a person's attitude or behavior : he had the sublime confidence of youth.

Of course we know that through the findings and ideas of people such as Edmund Burke and WIlliam Wordsworth, the sublime is much more complex than that.

Burke believed that "terror is in all cases whatsoever . . . the ruling principle of the sublime". His ideas were more focused around astonishment and violently emotional sublime than the people before him to study the concept. He said;

"The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other." [Burke, On the Sublime, ed. J. T. Bolton. 58]

Edmund Burke also made the links of beauty to pleasure and sublimity to pain, saying that beauty from pleasure makes your bodies fibres relaxed while sublimity from pain does the opposite, tightening the fibres. He was the first English writer to look at the sublime from an aesthetic point of view, meaning he was able to explain it purely by perception.

William Wordsworth took a different approach to the sublime, looking at it from a very natural perspective. The idea is that we do not simply observe nature to feel the sublime but we must immerse ourself in it and share it's energy as well.

Some typical examples of physical sublime images would be mountains, waterfalls, natural energies, ruins, and deserts.