Class Year
2022
Document Type
Student Research Paper
Date of Creation
Fall 2020
Department 1
English
Abstract
As a Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley bristled at rationalistic attempts to definitively categorize the human condition. Taking Edmund Burke’s treatise “On the Sublime and Beautiful” as his chief foil, Shelley explored aesthetic categories that certain strains of Enlightenment thought had held apart from one another. In my brief exegesis of his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” from 1816, I build on Rudolf Otto’s concept of the numinous and the work of intellectual historian Frank Ankersmit to argue that Shelley presents a holistic account of experience with the ineffable.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Lough, Christopher T., "Synthesizing the Sublime and Beautiful: Aesthetics in Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"" (2020). Student Publications. 874.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/874
Included in
Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Nonfiction Commons, Poetry Commons, Reading and Language Commons
Comments
Written for ENG 230: Topics in 19th Century Literature