Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

116The Poetry of John Keatsthe infinitude of his realm. In the second example, although Titian haspainted in precise outline the “sharp” and “angular” features of Ippolitode’ Medici, intensity of feeling discloses the “unity of intention innature, and in the artist” (18.163; see also 10.225). Even irregularparticulars are rendered absolute by the imagination (18.158–59).In the power that makes connexions, tragic passions excel allothers (4.268; 5.51–54; 18.164–65). 20 Coleridge and De Quincey,though not altogether barring tragedy from the sublime, recognize ahigher claim in the Bible and in Paradise Lost. 21 To the select companyof the Scriptures and Milton, Wordsworth adds only Spenser (PW,III, 82). But it is in tragedy that Hazlitt finds the greatest sublimity.“Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned species . . . , strives tocarry on the feeling to the utmost point of sublimity or pathos” (5.5).In the context of the tragic sublime, “pathos” means the intensity ofshared emotion. “The concluding events [of Lear] are sad, painfullysad; but their pathos is extreme” (4.270; my italics. See also 4.268).Most of the works that Hazlitt calls “sublime” or “grand” are tragicdramas, and among these the one he most frequently mentions assublime is King Lear. 22 It is “the best of all Shakespear’s plays” (4.257),distinguished by “the greatest depth of passion” (4.233; 5.185). On atleast six occasions Hazlitt uses the word “sublime” to describe Lear,and at least five of these illustrate what he calls “the sublime of familiarity,”which staggers the mind with materials foreign to the religioussublime (18.334).Lear discovers a good deal about evil before it finally destroys him.But the audience sees evil more plainly, as imagination brings extremesof folly and wisdom, malice and compassion, anger and forbearance,into an intuition of indeterminate but ordered magnitude. The tragicsublime—unlike Wordsworth’s sublime—holds no promise that “[evil]power may be overcome or rendered evanescent” (PW, II, 356). In theportrait of Ippolito de’ Medici, says Hazlitt, Titian has painted “a facewhich you would beware of rousing into anger or hostility, as youwould beware of setting in motion some complicated and dangerousmachinery” (12.286–87). The sublimity of the portrait lies in capturingthe “unity of intention” in a “nature” as irregular morally as Ippolito’sfeatures are diverse visually. Likewise, the “absolute truth and identity”of Macbeth’s character emerges from “an unruly chaos of strangeand forbidden things” as Shakespeare’s imagination explores “thefarthest bounds of nature and passion” (4.191–92; see also 5.206). The