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Sublime

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The sublime is an aesthetic quality of greatness, power, or terror that overwhelms the senses and intellect. It is an experience of awe mixed with fear.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

Gothic Poetry — Gothic poetry turns shadows, ruins, storms and supernatural suggestion into ways of exploring human fear, longing, guilt and uncertainty. More than a collection of frightening images, it is a flexible tradition concerned with what reason cannot comfortably explain.

Detailed Definition
From Longinus to Kant, the sublime involves a confrontation with the infinite. In poetry, it appears as a theme of nature's awe-inspiring power, or of human ambition. Poetic language strives to capture the unrepresentable, creating a sense of vastness. The sublime gives poetry its capacity for profound emotional impact, moving beyond beauty to a more complex, unsettling experience of greatness and limitation.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about a vast, terrifying landscape, like "Mont Blanc" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, invokes the sublime; The awe-inspiring nature of a starry night in a poem by John Keats is an experience of the sublime; The power of a great waterfall, as described in a poem, is a sublime subject; A poem that confronts the limits of human reason in the face of the infinite, like a poem on the ocean, is about the sublime.
Additional Notes
The sublime is an aesthetic and philosophical concept that describes a quality of greatness, power, or terror that overwhelms our senses and intellect. It is an experience of awe mixed with fear, often evoked by the vastness of nature (a towering mountain, a stormy sea) or by the infinite power of the human mind. Immanuel Kant distinguished the sublime from the beautiful: the beautiful is pleasurable and limited, while the sublime is painful yet exhilarating, pushing us to our limits. In poetry, the sublime appears as a theme of confronting the infinite, the unknowable, or the terrifying. Poetic language strives to capture the unrepresentable, creating a sense of overwhelming grandeur. This concept gives poetry its capacity for profound emotional impact.
Other Meanings of “Sublime”
Also Known As
The Sublime Aesthetic terror Transcendent greatness
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