'Far more deeply interfused': 'Tintern Abbey' between Burkean and Kantian Sublimity. Issue 1 (April 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Sommer, Tim
• Is Part Of: Romanticism. Volume 28:Issue 1(2022)
• Page Start: 12
• Page End: 23
• Publication Date: 2022-04
• Subjects: Wordsworth -- 'Tintern Abbey' -- Burke -- Kant -- aesthetics -- the sublime; Romanticism -- England -- History -- Periodicals; Romanticism -- Periodicals; English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 820.9145
• DOI: 10.3366/rom.2022.0533
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1354-991X

Abstract

Abstract : This essay traces the presence of eighteenth-century aesthetics in Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'. It argues that the poem's use of the term 'sublime' is more than just accidental. Rather than merely rehearsing a contemporary aesthetic commonplace, Wordsworth's references to the sublime are intertextually linked to two eighteenth-century models of the concept, the one outlined in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), the other developed in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790). Proceeding from a delineation of the Burkean and Kantian semantics of sublimity and a reading of their reverberations in Wordsworth's prose fragment 'The Sublime and the Beautiful', the essay suggests that 'Tintern Abbey' juxtaposes a sensationist sublime modelled on Burke's Enquiry with the intellectualist understanding of the term formulated in Kant's third Critique .