A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful Essay

The deceased are often remembered in either the best of themselves or the worst. Family and friends usually look back and reminisce on the most striking qualities held by their lost loved ones. Death is a shocking and confusing period for those affected by it and the whirlwind of emotions, such as the various stages of grief, catch many by surprise. Born in 1908, Theodore Roethke was an American poet who was deemed one of the most proficient and leading poets of his generation. In his poem, “Elegy for Jane”, Roethke uses a variety of poetic devices to express the different themes of love, happiness, and grief. His use of imagery, symbolism, persona, tone and word choice, contribute to the deeper meaning of the poem, assisting in the expression of the speaker’s feelings for Jane and of how, Jane, herself felt.

As one of the most frequently used themes, death has been portrayed and understood differently throughout modern history as well as by poets Christina Rossetti and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in “Remember” and the “Cross of Snow.” It appears in literature as the preeminent dilemma, one that is often met by emotions such as grief, hopefulness, depression, and one that can encompass the entire essence of any writing piece. However, despite Rossetti’s “Remember” and Longfellow’s “Cross of Snow” employing death as a universal similarity, the tones, narratives, and syntaxes of the poems help create two entire different images of what the works are about in the readers’ minds.

Mary Oliver’s poem, “Sleeping in the Forest,” presents a peaceful and vivid representation of death and its relationship with nature. As the poem begins, the reader is introduced to the earth welcoming the speaker back into the realm of nature. Man was created from the dust of the earth and when we die, our bodies return to the dust. However, this poem presents a more beautiful image of what death is composed of. Death is often portrayed as being frightening and disturbing. When individuals are presented with the thought of death, they often push this thought away out of fear and ignorance. Everyone will die someday whether we ignore the thought of death or not. However, Oliver creates a relaxing and welcoming image for the reader on what death (ideally) is. Obviously, since Oliver is still alive, she doesn’t know what death feels like. However, the way she describes death, I hope that it feels like sleeping in a forest; full of stars and enchantment.

The poem “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant reveals a very unusual aspect of nature. While most people think of nature as beauty and full of life, Bryant takes a more interesting approach to nature. He exposes a correlation between nature, life, death, and re-birth. Using nature as a foothold, Bryant exercises methods such as tone, setting, and imagery in a very intriguing way while writing “Thanatopsis.”

While the poem speaks of death, the tone is very subtle and joyful because of the multiple imageries of nature through diction such as “bird,” “garden,” and “water.”

The shock and catastrophe of the First World War was profound. The elegy was after its original purpose a poem of love and only later modified for poetry of mourning, wherefore it was a poetic form that helped to handle the loss of a person. Before WWI only the individual person was bemoaned and later, after or during WWI, poets started writing elegies to mourn the death of the war’s fallen in general.

Death is a recurrent premise in Seamus Heaney’s poems. In 1966, his book of poems entitled Death of a Naturalist was published. “Midterm Break”, which is a part of this collection, articulates Heaney’s memories of his four year old brother’s death. In the poem "Midterm Break," Seamus Heaney successfully uses imagery, diction, and structure to portray his first experience with personal loss.

Moving along throughout the semester, it’d be fair to say that, as per the presented curriculum of this Senior Seminar, I’ve gained a wider breadth of knowledge, and the means through which my exploration of “the sublime” can be furthered. Coinciding with a range of classical and modern writers, and their respective texts, grants this elusive concept with multifaceted sources and approaches for us to comprehend, whether literal, anecdotal, or otherwise. What’s most striking to me, though, beyond the basis of a simple, rudimentary definition, are human consequences, as we become proverbial viewers, and, basically, “discoverers” of these phenomena. Recurring circumstances in all these works have each suggested that, though a large majority of these things have existed long before us, and will continue long after us, we are, of course, receiving whatever small insights from our own

Emily Dickinson, born in a puritan and religious family in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, is known to be one of the greatest poets of all time. However, she is characterized because she seldom left her home and had few visitors. By 1860, Dickinson lived in almost complete isolation, and yet the few people to ever have contact with her were a huge influence on her poetry. Grief, was Dickinson’s primary companion, especially during her writing period, which some scholars attribute as the time between 1858 and 1865. Similarly, Giacomo Leopardi, who specialized in the analysis of the cause of human unhappiness, went through what is referred to poetic silence (1823-1830). That is to say, Leopardi was also a victim of his own seclusion. What connects both poets despite them not crossing paths on earth is their focus on death and love as recurring themes in their poems. Leopardi’s thoughts evolved from the gradual awareness of his own unhappiness, which was caused by the solitude and isolation of his upbringing. Both poets are prominent in world literature, but what was it that made them what they are? Is it their solitude, grief and unrequited love what led them to share interest in both death and unhappiness? It is clear that for both poets, their decision to live life as recluses did not close their mind whatsoever, but rather allowed the flow of new thoughts and inner experiences with self-discovery.

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    The book Of Love and Other Demons (1994), written by the Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has more characteristics of sublime literature than of magical realist literature. Magical Realism and the sublime are so closely related that distinguishing between the two is hard. They are more closely related than magical realism and the fantastic.

To talk about the Enlightenment taking current times into consideration, and more specifically to talk about an enlightened aesthetic, may seem unusual as the concept “enlightened” is usually identify with political regimes and scientific systems. But the truth is a return to the meaning of the concept of enlightenment and its aesthetic has never been so necessary for understanding the world that surrounds us as now. At a time in which "cultural marketing" and culture industries and their products are spreaded, it is inevitable to put back on scene the aesthetic reflection that accompanies the Enlightenment movement of the 18th century. For them, one of the great aesthetic categories traditions will be discussed: the sublime, starting from

As the title, “The Consolations of Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam,” suggests, this dissertation aimed to clarify the various modes of consolation that were experienced by Alfred Tennyson, depicted in the text of In Memoriam, following the poignant and untimely death of Arthur Henry Hallam. The richness of the poem as a monument to grief is partly because of its outstanding length and newly invented rhyme scheme, but also because the long time period over which it was composed. In order to understand the consolations in the poem, the text was analyzed from several perspectives.

In the wide swept plains of Africa, the sun stands as high as a tyrant, beating down with unforgiving ferocity. The plains are infested with beasts that have claws, horns, or tusks that growl, hiss, or grunt. These beasts’ lives are filled with struggle, trying to survive; Death is not unfamiliar here. Assaulting the sun’s blue domain, Kilimanjaro stands unmoving: undying. No beasts live at the peak of Kilimanjaro and few beasts attempt to summit the “House of God.” In the distance a man lies in the shade of a mimosa tree, making an acquaintance with Death. It is the man’s final words and thoughts that make the story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The black ink on the colorless page tells the story of this man, Harry, and his interaction with his wife on his deathbed while remembering his own life and wishing he had done more. Behind the bars of words lies a deeper truth common to all of mankind. Ernest Hemingway conveys in his short story the placement of man in terms of the temporary and the eternal. He depicts society’s grievance towards death. He explores the permanence of death and the denial of its power of mankind. Hemingway also presents two sides of death, how it is both wild and savage, yet welcoming and trusted. By careful usage of setting, characters, and weather, Hemingway writes more than a story of one man dying, but the story of all men dying.

From the very first week I wanted a purpose for the sublime, I wanted to know the value in experiencing it. And now that Kant created this dichotomy between beautiful and sublime, why would anyone ever choose the sublime? Beauty to me means joy, tranquility, and love, the sublime means confusion and fear.