Representing Creation, Experiencing the Sublime: The Longinian Tradition in Tasso and Milton

Abstract

This essay aims to demonstrate how Tasso and Milton were conscious of the Longinian tradition and aware of fashioning a poetry of the sublime when rewriting the story of creation. The author of Il mondo creato incorporates the Longinian model of sublime ekstasis into his concept of meraviglia to construct his own poetics of artistic creation. Despite Milton’s indebtedness to Tasso, in Paradise Lost the English poet distances himself from a full commitment to Longinian ekstasis and locates the sublime in a more dialogical, if not dialectical, compositional model of poetic creation. From a broader perspective, this paper aims to illustrate the centrality of the sublime in fashioning early modern literary poetics.