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 a narrative, ho...