Ethics, Sublimity and Hospitality

Abstract

This article presents a study of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Coleridge and ‘Resolution and Independence’ by Wordsworth. The readings are mainly addressed by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and try to present a conception of sublimity which mainly revolves around ethical awareness and sensibility so as to gauge the extent to which they can possibly hint at ethical issues at stake. We propose that these poetic works deal with the other and the sublimity of the encounter between the self and the other. Each of these works offers similar images of the self before the encounter – that of dwelling, self-preoccupation and enjoyment – but the speakers come out of the encounter differently: in ‘The Rime’, the Mariner roams throughout the country and recounts his experience for other ‘others’ in the hope of spreading what he now can probably identify as ‘the Good’; in ‘Resolution and Independence’, the speaker simply comes out of the unsettling and sublime encounter with the leech-gatherer enlightened and mindful of the other. The conclusion is that one significant part of the idea of the sublime in Romanticism deals with irreducible alterities – cosmic/ontic as well as (more importantly) human – and while they ineluctably reduce them to the language of poetry, each treatment can be evaluated by analysing how well they express the ruptures and interstices of alterity within a language which can go beyond language.