LONGINUS (First Century AD)

• Among the manuscripts survived, a Greek work called “On the

Sublime” and this was attributed to “Longinus”, from the first century
AD. The identity of “Longinus” is not known.
• Plato focused on a literary work’s essence. Aristotle focused on the
constituent parts of a work. Horace focused on literary taste. Unlike
them, Longinus focused on single elements of a text. He is the first
critic to define a literary classic.
• He can be considered as not only the first Romantic critic, but also the
first comparative critic. He compared Greek and Latin literature. He
• Plato declares poetic inspiration a divine madness. Longinus’s concept
of the sublime blends inspiration and rhetorical mastery. Thus, a poet
should learn rhetorical devices, but also imitate great writers because
they have great souls. Skill in invention and ordering of the parts of a
whole are important, but sublimity “flashing forth at the right
moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt”. Poetry is not
only made of inspiration and writing naturally because nature itself is
also ordered. Unordered sublimity is ineffective.
• Longinus defines the ingredients of sublimity as follows:
1) There is “grandeur of thought” (power of forming great
conceptions). Sublimity is the echo of a great soul. To have great
ideas one must have greatness. It is not possible that men with
mean and servile ideas and aims should produce anything that is
admirable and worthy of immortality. He cites examples from
Homer and shows when a poet is at his best in descriptive writing
and he thinks this is the work of a man of a noble spirit.
2) The second source of sublimity is “powerful emotion”. When this
strong emotion is applied to the material, it fills what is said with
divine exultation. These two constituents of sublimity, “grandeur of
thought and powerful emotion”, derive largely from natural/innate
gifts. The other three constituents are acquired by art.
3) The third is a mastery of many and various devices of style and
methods of presentation.
4) The fourth is acute sensitivity to the qualities of words and to the
potentialities of imagery.
5) The fifth constituent is the orderly placing of words, the ear for
rhythm and pace, sonority and roundedness, aural architecture and
fluency. Indeed this fifth constituent seems to comprehend also
everything that Horace recommended in his emphasis upon
consistency and coherence in overall structure.
• According to Longinus, when our intellects, emotions, and wills
harmoniously respond to a given work of art, we know that we have
been touched by the sublime. He believes that sublimity is
recognizable because within each of us is a power which aspires
toward the great and the noble.
• Longinus emphasized the qualities of imaginative literature which
resist rules and precepts and says that literature cannot be attained
by technical expertise alone. He thinks that the poet needs individual
genius. In this sense, he is against Horace’s ideas of a poet who obeys
literary rules and work hard can become successful. The practice of
literature cannot be reduced to a matter of hard work, persistent self-
criticism, and the disciplined exercise of artistry. He argues that
inspiration, animation, and imaginative reach can give birth to
passages of exultant sublimity that flash upon the reader so as to
electrify and entrance him. Longinus values the power of poetry at its
most intense, not just to satisfy, but to astonish, to enrapture, and to
exalt.
• The concept of sublime is very important to the 18th century criticism.