Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century

No author in the English canon seems more deserving of the epithet sublime than John Milton. Yet Milton’s sublimity has long been dismissed as an invention of eighteenth-century criticism: the poet himself, the story goes, could hardly have had any notion of the sublime, a concept that only took shape in the decades after his death with the advent of philosophical aesthetics. Such judgments fail, however, to acknowledge the importance of the fact that Milton is one of the first writers in English to refer to Longinus, the author traditionally associated with the Ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime. This book argues that Milton did have an idea of the sublime, one that came to him from Longinus but also from a larger classical tradition that offered a pre-aesthetic predecessor of the aesthetic concept of the sublime. Far from being anachronistic, Milton’s “abstracted sublimities” touch on almost every aspect of his thought, from rhetoric to politics, from science to theology. Making substantive contributions to literary scholarship, classical reception studies, and the history of ideas, this book seeks to return the sublime to its proper place at the forefront of Milton criticism, to reevaluate the diffusion of Longinian texts and concepts in early modern Europe, and to record a crucial missing chapter in the history of the sublime.