Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

112The Poetry of John Keatsprocess does to empirical reality Coleridge describes in “Hymn beforeSun-rise in the Vale of Chamouni.” Here all the images of Mont Blancmerge into infinite oneness as the mountain becomes a “kingly Spirit,”a “dread Ambassador from Earth to Heaven.” Yet, while their separateness(a less ambiguous word than Coleridge’s “shapeliness”) “vanishesfrom . . . thought,” all these forms remain “visible to the bodily sense,”as indeed they must in order to sustain the dialectic of metaphor. 5When Coleridge analyzes imagination at work, he makes it clear justwhat objects lose and what they keep. For Coleridge, we must recall,the imagination is not the faculty that Kant finds wanting; that is,it is not merely the faculty that combines sensory impressions andreproduces them to the understanding. 6 Coleridge gives the imaginationdirect access to reason and the power to render sensory images“consubstantial” with the truths of reason. 7 When the imaginationseeks to reconcile opposites—such as “Shadow” and “Substance” inMilton’s description of death 8 —the imagination “repels” and again“calls forth what it again negatives . . . to substitute a grand feeling ofthe unimaginable for a mere image.” What the mind repels and againcalls forth are the images of fancy, wherein the mind’s contributionof thought and feeling is minimal. What the mind rejects, however,is not the empirical reality of fancy but the abstract unreality of ideas“fixed” in the “understanding.” 9 This is the dialectic of both beautyand sublimity. Both draw on reason to inform sensory objects withsome principle beyond time and space. But whereas a beautiful objectdoes this by displaying separate parts unified within a determinatewhole, 10 the sublime dismisses all thought confined by space or time.That is to say, although the sublime, like the beautiful, repels imagesas yet inchoate, it altogether rejects the kind of separateness that theunderstanding imposes on ideas. Neither beauty nor sublimity has anyuse for “a mountain,” which is an abstraction frozen outside of reality.Beauty, nevertheless, must keep ‘‘this particular mountain” distinctfrom “that particular cloud”; while sublimity repels all “mountains”and all “clouds” into anonymous sensation. Sensory objects, unnamedbut still unfaded, remain present to the senses, their reality extendedbut visually unimpaired. Blake’s microcosmic grain of sand would stillfeel gritty between even the most innocent fingers.At this point a definition of the Romantic sublime, as generalizedfrom Coleridge, seems to be in order: Sublimity is a quality, bestowedby the mind, which extends the reality of external objects by repudiating the