Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite pain and danger, that is to say whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror is a source of the sublime…it is productive of the strongest emotions which the mind is capable of feeling.
— Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757
[While for earlier writers] the sublime is really a superior form of the beautiful, for Burke the two ideas are opposed and mutually exclusive. Burke starts from Longinus’ view that the sublime produces a violent effect but takes it much further in maintaining that the degree of violence is a measure for the value of the emotion….as for Longinus, the passion aroused by the sublime is astonishment, but Burke defines more precisely the qualities which go to arouse it: terror, obscurity, power, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence, and darkness.
— Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake
Hawk Roosting
Ted Hughes
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads –
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
1960
