Robert Lowell and the Psychopathology of the Sublime

Abstract

If Longinus were alive today he undoubtedly would be surprised by the vast proliferation of interpretations of what he once called hupsos. For the Greek philosopher who may or may not have written On the Sublime sometime during the third century A.D., hupsos was type of highly charged rhetoric intended to elevate listeners, paradoxically, above rhetoric. Geniuses like Homer displayed a consummate excellence and distinction of language . . . not to persuade the audience but to transport them out of themselves (125). Their goal was ecstasy rather than advocacy. If orators convinced and poets astonished, Longinus argued that the speechmakers should court the muses more deliberately. A well-timed flash of sublimity, he declared, scatters everything before it like bolt of lightning and reveals the full power of the speaker at single stroke (125). Whoever witnessed this Zeuslike rhetorical power could not help but absorb the divine afflatus. So captivated was the listener that he lost his sense of identity, merged with the source of power, and ultimately fantasied that he was the source. Uplifted with sense of proud possession, Longinus confessed, are filled with joyful pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard (139). The leap from hupsos to hubris, from sublimity to tragedy, was small one. Although Longinus found Plato's writings sublime, and therefore must have believed, at least during his enraptured reading, that he was Plato, the older philosopher initiated what would become deepseated opposition to the sublime poetic frenzies Longinus extolled. Longinus was hardly an inflammatory anarchist who thought all inspirations divine; he inveighed against the stylistic excesses that render descriptions ridiculous and characterizations implausible. Nevertheless, he resisted Plato's rigorous devotion to reason, persistently