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    Longinus

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    Basak Bucan
    Longinus was a Greek critic from the 1st century AD. He is considered the first romantic critic and the first comparative critic as he compared Greek and Latin literature. Longinus focused on defining the sublime elements that elevate great works of literature above all others. He identified five ingredients of sublimity: grandeur of thought, powerful emotion, mastery of style and presentation, sensitivity to language and imagery, and skillful ordering of elements. Longinus believed the sublime arises from a writer possessing a great soul and natural gifts, not just technical skill.

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    Longinus

    Uploaded by

    Basak Bucan
    153 views6 pages
    Longinus was a Greek critic from the 1st century AD. He is considered the first romantic critic and the first comparative critic as he compared Greek and Latin literature. Longinus focused on defining the sublime elements that elevate great works of literature above all others. He identified five ingredients of sublimity: grandeur of thought, powerful emotion, mastery of style and presentation, sensitivity to language and imagery, and skillful ordering of elements. Longinus believed the sublime arises from a writer possessing a great soul and natural gifts, not just technical skill.

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    Longinus was a Greek critic from the 1st century AD. He is considered the first romantic critic and the first comparative critic as he compared Greek and Latin literature. Longinus focused on defining the sublime elements that elevate great works of literature above all others. He identified five ingredients of sublimity: grandeur of thought, powerful emotion, mastery of style and presentation, sensitivity to language and imagery, and skillful ordering of elements. Longinus believed the sublime arises from a writer possessing a great soul and natural gifts, not just technical skill.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    153 views6 pages

    Longinus

    Uploaded by

    Basak Bucan
    Longinus was a Greek critic from the 1st century AD. He is considered the first romantic critic and the first comparative critic as he compared Greek and Latin literature. Longinus focused on defining the sublime elements that elevate great works of literature above all others. He identified five ingredients of sublimity: grandeur of thought, powerful emotion, mastery of style and presentation, sensitivity to language and imagery, and skillful ordering of elements. Longinus believed the sublime arises from a writer possessing a great soul and natural gifts, not just technical skill.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    LONGINUS (First Century AD)

    • Among the manuscripts survived, a Greek work called “On the


    Sublime” and this was attributed to “Longinus”, from the first century
    AD. The identity of “Longinus” is not known.
    • Plato focused on a literary work’s essence. Aristotle focused on the
    constituent parts of a work. Horace focused on literary taste. Unlike
    them, Longinus focused on single elements of a text. He is the first
    critic to define a literary classic.
    • He can be considered as not only the first Romantic critic, but also the
    first comparative critic. He compared Greek and Latin literature. He
    • Plato declares poetic inspiration a divine madness. Longinus’s concept
    of the sublime blends inspiration and rhetorical mastery. Thus, a poet
    should learn rhetorical devices, but also imitate great writers because
    they have great souls. Skill in invention and ordering of the parts of a
    whole are important, but sublimity “flashing forth at the right
    moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt”. Poetry is not
    only made of inspiration and writing naturally because nature itself is
    also ordered. Unordered sublimity is ineffective.
    • Longinus defines the ingredients of sublimity as follows:
    1) There is “grandeur of thought” (power of forming great
    conceptions). Sublimity is the echo of a great soul. To have great
    ideas one must have greatness. It is not possible that men with
    mean and servile ideas and aims should produce anything that is
    admirable and worthy of immortality. He cites examples from
    Homer and shows when a poet is at his best in descriptive writing
    and he thinks this is the work of a man of a noble spirit.
    2) The second source of sublimity is “powerful emotion”. When this
    strong emotion is applied to the material, it fills what is said with
    divine exultation. These two constituents of sublimity, “grandeur of
    thought and powerful emotion”, derive largely from natural/innate
    gifts. The other three constituents are acquired by art.
    3) The third is a mastery of many and various devices of style and
    methods of presentation.
    4) The fourth is acute sensitivity to the qualities of words and to the
    potentialities of imagery.
    5) The fifth constituent is the orderly placing of words, the ear for
    rhythm and pace, sonority and roundedness, aural architecture and
    fluency. Indeed this fifth constituent seems to comprehend also
    everything that Horace recommended in his emphasis upon
    consistency and coherence in overall structure.
    • According to Longinus, when our intellects, emotions, and wills
    harmoniously respond to a given work of art, we know that we have
    been touched by the sublime. He believes that sublimity is
    recognizable because within each of us is a power which aspires
    toward the great and the noble.
    • Longinus emphasized the qualities of imaginative literature which
    resist rules and precepts and says that literature cannot be attained
    by technical expertise alone. He thinks that the poet needs individual
    genius. In this sense, he is against Horace’s ideas of a poet who obeys
    literary rules and work hard can become successful. The practice of
    literature cannot be reduced to a matter of hard work, persistent self-
    criticism, and the disciplined exercise of artistry. He argues that
    inspiration, animation, and imaginative reach can give birth to
    passages of exultant sublimity that flash upon the reader so as to
    electrify and entrance him. Longinus values the power of poetry at its
    most intense, not just to satisfy, but to astonish, to enrapture, and to
    exalt.
    • The concept of sublime is very important to the 18th century criticism.

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