Understanding the sublime as a figure of speech, La Bruyère says "it only paints truth, in a noble subject; it paints it whole, in its causes & effects; it is a figure of speech only the greatest among the geniuses may master."
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But I feel there's another aspect to the Sublime this definition leaves out. The English understood the overwhelming aspect of the sublime as the same which one could find in a roaring sea & furious storms, which are however NOT poetic.
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If natural phenomena can be sublime, we must then understand that man's perception of the world is an inherently aesthetic phenomenon; that the act of perception is also one of creation. Or it could be something else.
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Perception is indeed creation; through perception we impose limit & difference upon the continuity of the real. The sublime in nature is best exemplified by storms & seas, because they are undifferentiated, they have no edges, they englobe the subject in their formless totality.
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The sublime is the fusion of both feminine and masculine impulses: it has the powerful ordering of the masculine & the boundless profusion of the feminine fused into a single point of near infinite density. The absolute sublime is a monad, it contains a world.
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The sublime transcends poetry, as it marks the point where perception is no longer possible. It is the summit of human experience. It redeems everything base about life. As it can be found in nature & is beyond poetry, it should be the basis upon which we build our ars poetica.
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