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The Poetry of Robert Lowell 191as well as mistaken feelings of sublimity. Lowell does the same. AsLowell’s biographer Ian Hamilton points out, “ ‘enthusiasm’ is a wordhe regularly uses to describe his manic episodes (the term probablyderives from his reading in theology).” 6 Emerson also harks back to thelongstanding theological controversy over enthusiasm; he could hardlyhelp being aware of it since his father named one of his brothers afterHarvard’s most vociferous anti-enthusiast, Charles Chauncey, thescourge of Jonathan Edwards and all those who followed his brand ofenthusiastic evangelism. Lowell dwells on the same debate in his autobiographicalprose and poetry; he considers enthusiasm in its religious,pathological, and aesthetic contexts as a dubious boon whose sublimeuplift always pitches one toward a disastrous fall.Like theorists of the sublime from Longinus to Burke and Kant,both Emerson and Lowell describe enthusiasm (from entheos, the godwithin) as a highly charged but also a dangerous form of sublimity.Both realize its potential for personal and mass hysteria, and value areligion based on reason rather than on unbridled emotion. Still, theyfind a place for enthusiasm in their worldviews. Their private debateswith enthusiasm and sublimity take much of their impetus fromKant, whose aesthetics echo in Emerson’s essays and Lowell’s poems.While Emerson absorbed Kant’s doctrines from Coleridge andfriends like James Elliot Cabot, Lowell studied them in an aestheticscourse taught by Ransom at Kenyon College. An excerpt from Kant’sCritique of Judgement that discusses the sublime was included in E.F.Carritt’s Philosophies of Beauty, the textbook used in Ransom’s class.Determined to differentiate the sublime’s rational, moral, and divineattributes from their false appearances in religious frenzy, Kantproclaims: “The idea of the good to which affection is superadded isenthusiasm. This state of mind appears to be sublime: so much so thatthere is a common saying that nothing great can be achieved withoutit.” Although it casts reason to the winds, Kant believes that “froman aesthetic point of view, enthusiasm is sublime, because it is aneffort of one’s powers called forth by ideas which give to the mind animpetus of far stronger and more enduring efficacy than the stimulusafforded by sensible representations.” 7 In a passage from his essay“Circles” that Lowell must have read, Emerson repeats Kant’s claimthat “[n]othing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,”and thenadds with his characteristic high spirits: “The way of life is wonderful:it is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities