The Sublime

In the Renaissance, “the sublime” is a constant word, concept, and poetics of greatness. This discovery revises the received wisdom which locates the sublime in the eighteenth century. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English poetry becomes sublime. From Spenser to Shakespeare to Milton, the sublime forms the key poetic by which English authorship achieves literary renown. Bringing together classical and medieval notions of the sublime, Renaissance authors invent a potent new myth: the Renaissance hero, like the author, aspires to Christian greatness in a free state. Between 1579 and 1674, Renaissance poets invent a fiction about the period itself.