LonginusвЂ™s treatise was about style in writing. We have to distinguish between two aspects of the sublime in order to see what was novel about the modern account of it.

Boileau coined the famous phrase вЂњje ne sais quoiвЂќ (literally, вЂњI do not knowвЂќ) to describe what made something sublime-something powerful, perhaps overwhelmingly so, but not conformable to some preexistent category, like that by which we think of beauty as harmonious (for example). But the sublime is something different, and what that difference is was interesting, first of all, to Longinus, then to Boileau, and then to the 18th-century theorists and philosophers (Edmund Burke, Hugh Blair, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel especially) and the 19th-century poets who followed them. The beautiful had been a perennial object of aesthetic and philosophical interest, from Plato onward. The word sublime is BoileauвЂ™s translation of LonginusвЂ™s height, or elevation, and it stuck. It was a major topic of aesthetic theory in the 18th century, especially in England and Germany, but its inauguration as a topic was due to the translation by Nicolas Boileau (1636вЂ“ 1711) of LonginusвЂ™s third-century treatise Peri Hypsos (Of elevation) into French in 1674. The sublime is a central category of aesthetics in romanticism.

Sublime sublime