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A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful Essay

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In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Edmund Burke writes, “It is the nature of grief to keep its object perpetually in its eye, to present it in its most pleasurable views, to repeat all the circumstances that attend to it”. Burke’s writing attempts to clarify the “pictorial, literary, cultural, economic and psychological” phenomenon of sublimity, explicating the ways in which power, vastness, obscurity and beauty intersect to form emotional response. A Philosophical Enquiry elucidates why so many Romantic poets and writers would make grief, mourning and death the subjects of their works; the limitless, obscure, infinite theme death corresponds to the existential, contemplative and introspective ideas Romantic writers were attempting to interrogate. But the subject of death in Romantic literature transcends the topic of corporeal death and explores the death of memory, of youth, of innocence and of the past. Furthermore, the Romantic writers were grappling with a shifting, changing society that caused a sense of pervasive loss in their works; as artists, authors and the population attempted to navigate a society characterized by political revolution and technological innovation, poems about mourning act as almost consolatory works. Amongst this writing which attempts to navigate the subject of grief, nature is a recurring element. By examining the locations or settings authors used as a backdrop for their reflections on death

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