Coleridge: Sublimity or Beauty?

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the sublime, as formulated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, has been systematically misunderstood. It demonstrates that texts principally concerned with the beautiful have been interpreted as if they were principally, or indeed exclusively, focused on the sublime. It also contests the apparent scholarly consensus that Coleridge’s notions of sublimity and beauty are irreconcilable. This critique focuses on Christopher Stokes’s Coleridge, Language and the Sublime, the only book-length study of Coleridge’s sublime, and, to a lesser degree, the analyses of Elinor Shaffer. My argument includes a demonstration of the Platonic, rather than the Kantian, character of Coleridge’s aesthetics. In proposing an alternative reading of Coleridge’s sublime, this article demonstrates that it can only be properly understood in terms of its profound dependence on the beautiful.