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The natural sublime is a paradox. While the literal definition of “sublime” is to elevate, the definition of “sublime” as it occurs in literature, or the rhetorical sublime, is more complex. The rhetorical sublime is the highest achievement of writing; it is passionate yet controlled. The sublime in nature is grounded in terror, yet there are few more rewarding experiences than those that invoke it. There has been debate over the true meaning of sublimity for hundreds of years; I should note here that I will mainly reference 18^th century sources, as well as Pseudo—Longinus, whose treatise on the sublime was in vogue during the 18^th century. William Wordsworth and Giacomo Leopardi could both invoke the sublime in their poetry but held opposite views on its ramifications. Wordsworth, one of the greatest of the English poets, employed the natural sublime at the crux of his greatest works as a way to elevate man to a nearly divine status. He lived from 1770--1850, and although younger writers of the Romantic period such as Percy Shelley felt that he turned his back on his ideals when he won an elected position in the British government, he was still considered by most to be the greatest poet of his age. Leopardi, unlike Wordsworth, used the natural sublime to prove the frailty of mankind. Through examining Leopardi’s poem “La Ginestra”, and juxtaposing his use of the sublime against the sublime in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude, I will investigate the ways in which contrasting the works of the two writers helps us to gain a better understanding of the Wordsworthian sublime.

Before we discuss the sublime, it is necessary to investigate the history of this complex concept. The Latin adjective “sublimis” is defined in The Latin Dictionary as “high, raised high, lifted up; (character) eminent, aspiring; (language) lofty, elevated (338).” The first essay on record that deals with the sublime is the treatise initially attributed to Longinus, “On The Sublime”. Since Longinus’ authorship of the treatise has been disproved, and no one knows who the true author was, scholars refer to him as Pseudo--Longinus. Whereas later philosophers such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant concern themselves with the sublime as a passion felt, Pseudo--Longinus defined the sublime as a mode of writing that is influenced by nature in terms of power and practice, commonly known as the rhetorical sublime. As the following passage suggests, Pseudo--Longinus defined the sublime as the passionate deployment of the greatest rhetorical skills of the writer. Instances of the sublime in literature are not diffuse, but concentrated into a single stroke of brilliance. As Pseudo--Longinus illustrates in the following passage, the true sublime is modeled after nature:

Nature in her loftier and more passionate moods, while detesting all appearance of restraint, is not wont to show herself utterly wayward and reckless; and though in all cases the vital informing principle is derived from her, yet to determine the right degree and the right moment, and to contribute the precision of practice and experience, is the peculiar province of the scientific method (Aristotle’s Poetic’s and Rhetoric, 137).

Thus, the sublime in literature is a combination of an elevated or lofty style, passion, power and control on the part of the writer. Pseudo--Longinus goes on to provide examples of sublimity in literature as well as offer instruction on how one might achieve sublimity in one’s own writing, but following Pseudo--Longinus any longer would mean digression, since the aim of this essay is to examine the sublime as it manifests as a passion. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry examines the sublime as an emotion that stems from terror, and therefore it behooves us to take a close look at it.

Burke does not start his enquiry by examining the sublime immediately. Rather, he makes a scientific investigation of the passions, and uses his evidence to explain the nature and power of the sublime. Burke asserts that the strongest human passion is fear in general, and fear of death in particular. Pain is a powerful motivator, and this is so because beyond the immediate inconvenience of pain, we associate pain with death. Therefore, passions grounded in fear will always be stronger than those grounded in pleasure. Ironically, Burke believed that terror and pain, two of the most distressing feelings that a human can have, could actually be pleasurable: “When danger or pain press to nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience (Enquiry, 36--37).” Burke goes on to explain that the reason sublime feelings are so powerful is because they are grounded in terror, which is the strongest passion that one can feel. It is worth noting that both Burke and Kant held the sublime to be a feeling, not a thing to be found in and of itself in nature or anywhere but within. Thus, when one describes a volcano as sublime, they are actually referring to the capacity of the volcano to trigger the sublime in them. Furthermore, Burke writes, “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror (Enquiry, pg 53, emphasis mine).” Compare this to Wordsworth in “Lines”:

It is worth pointing out that while Wordsworth’s sublime in this instance does not overtly suggest terror, the state of astonishment that he describes is similar to the example in Enquiry above. The following definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary Online Database lists two definitions for astonish that suggest a state of awe, such as it is described above: “to give a shock of wonder by the presentation of something unlooked for or unaccountable,” and “to stun mentally.” It should suffice to say that Wordsworth was familiar with Burke’s influential essay. Wordworth’s deployment of the sublime seems to owe more to Kant’s definition of it than Burke’s, specifically where the views of the two philosophers overlap. Curiously, Wordsworth disavowed any knowledge of Kantian philosophy, as Walsh Stoddard pointed out in his article from the publication The Wordsworth Circle entitled “Flashes of the Invisible World”: “In his later years, Wordsworth emphatically denied direct knowledge of German philosophy…Sir William Hamilton reported Wordsworth’s avowal that he was “utterly ignorant of everything connected with Kant or his philosophy (32).” Immanuel Kant also wrote an influential essay dealing with the sublime, which we will now discuss in greater detail.

Kant’s discourse on the sublime is included in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, which explores the human faculty of taste. During Kant’s time, taste was not associated with individual preference, as it is today. Taste was not thought to be a socially constructed faculty, but one that was basically the same in all people, although the more refined were thought to have a superior sense of taste. It was also thought that taste inspired morality[1]. Kant was of the opinion that the sublime was evoked not from external sources in themselves, but from the mind’s repulsion from things terrible in nature. The sublime could also be found in the astonishment experienced when one attempts to imagine something absolutely vast in size or number. Faced with something that appears to be endless, our minds fail to grasp infinity and are in awe of the prospect of it. Kant believed that the sublime could ultimately only be found in the realm of ideas. Kant scholar Heny Allison quotes Kant in his book Kant’s Theory of Taste:

[N]othing in nature can be given, however large we may judge it, that could not, when considered in a different relation, be degraded all the way to the infinitely small, nor conversely anything so small that it could not, when compared with still smaller standards, be expanded for out imagination all the way to the magnitude of a world; telescopes have provided us with a wealth of material in support of the first point, microscopes in support of the second (314).

Kant’s concept of the sublime coincides with Wordsworth’s here inasmuch as Wordsworth attributed sublimity to the imagination itself. Thus having reviewed discourse on the sublime, we shall examine its literary emergences.

Few writers ever accorded nature such a sense of terrible power as did Leopardi. He was born in Rencanti, Italy, and lived from 1798 to 1837. He was among the greatest writers of the 19^th century, and is known for his bleak philosophy. Ever present in his writing is a sense of the insignificance and futility of human life. His poem “La Ginestra”, which I will discuss later, is the greatest example of his philosophy on nature’s tyranny. He regards most of nature with unaffected terror, and his view of his fellow man is decidedly pessimistic. He is quite unlike Wordsworth in his fear of nature and the erudite nature of his writing. Even so, his method of writing was strikingly similar to Wordsworth’s, as the following passage by Ottavio Mark Casale indicates: “Although he apparently never read Wordsworth or the latter’s definition of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquility,’ Leopardi’s analysis of poetic composition is similar: ‘the period of enthusiasm, heat, and agitated imagination is not right [for poetic creation]; indeed it works against it. One needs a time of intensity, but tranquil intensity, a time of real genius rather than real excitement…an impression of past or future or habitual emotion rather than its actual presence (A Leopardi Reader, 55).’”

Leopardi’s writing was fueled by a reverence for ancient learning; he had a working knowledge of Latin as well as several other languages by the age of 10, and he spent most of his youth devouring books in his father’s substantial library (Pensieri, 11). According to Ottavio Mark Casale, Leopardi’s “poetry an d poetic theory owed much to Homer, Pseudo--Longinus, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Tasso, Petrarch, Burke and the English ‘graveyard poets’, Alfieri, and Foscolo (A Leopardi Reader, 13).” In her article “Leopardi’s “L’Infinito” and the Language of the Romantic Sublime”, Margaret Brose asserted that Leopardi defended Classical authors over the Romantic writers because the Romantics, as well as all other modern writers, are clouded by what passes for reason: “Leopardi defends Classicism (the ancients) against Romanticism (the moderns) on the grounds that the ancients wrote superior ‘affective’ verse. The ancients (the true poets) achieved poetic sublimity by means of an imitation of nature in which nature becomes transumed by its linguistic encoding into a more forceful representation than it posses in naked perception. “The ancient poets”, argues Leopardi, “imitated Nature, and they imitated it in such a way that it appeared to be transposed (transportata) in their verses, not merely imitated (“Leoaprdi’s ‘L’Infinito’ and the language of the Romantic Sublime”, 50--51).” Leopardi only used the word “sublime” once in his published poetry, in the poem “La Ginestra”:

Obviously, Leopardi was using the sublime in a sarcastic fashion. While it seems that this poem could have been directed at Wordsworth himself, the general consensus is that Leopardi did not read his work. Based on what we do know of the critical opinions of Leopardi, he probably would have thought that Wordsworth’s was a false sublimity. He favored the classical writers because they had to imagine everything for the first time; to our knowledge, they did not have the precedents of other advanced cultures to learn from[2]. Leopardi believed that when the ancients wrote of nature, it was not merely imitated, but that it was transmuted into the sublime. He believed that modern writers either imitated the classics, or imitated nature falsely, and that the effect in both cases is not as effective. Perhaps Leopardi regretted his own emphasis on learning through myriad hours in a library learning through experience in nature. He also believed that when we are children, we are in a similar state to that of the ancients, in that everything is new to us. With age comes reason and education, and they limit the creative ability of our imaginations. The result of Leopardi’s fervent study during his childhood and adolescence was physical deformity and bouts of blindness. While the physically robust Wordsworth did attend Cambridge and read Latin, his philosophy espoused that nature is the best tutor. Leopardi saw nature as his worst enemy.

There is no question that Leopardi was terrified of nature. It is often his descriptions of both the power of nature and the insignificance of man, especially when compared to nature that are the most moving. Leopardi’s poetry very much captures the Burkean sublime. Edmund Burke wrote A Philisophical Enquiry in his early 20’s, which contains an eloquent and influential investigation of the sublime. It is Burke’s contention that the natural sublime is grounded in fear that is important for our purposes. I will discuss Burke’s philosophy in detail later. Although Leopardi and Wordsworth differed substantially, they surprisingly came together on the sublimity of nature. Wordsworth worshipped nature, and he attributed nature a sublime aspect that seemed to be grounded more in astonishment than terror. Both men would have agreed on the power of nature, good or ill.

Leopardi’s poem “La Ginestra”, which I shall discuss shortly, goes into more detail on his thoughts of the futility of existence. One of the reasons for their divergence in their beliefs concerning mankind’s station is the philosophical beliefs of both writers. Wordsworth flirted with pantheism, but was a Christian in the end. Leopardi was clearly an atheist. Leopardi’s terror of nature manifests sublimely in “La Ginestra”.

Leopardi calls Mt. Vesuvius an “amazing Exterminator” in the third line of “La Ginestra”. Indeed, the danger inherent everywhere in nature is the theme of the poem. This is no Wye Valley, where a man may repose under a sycamore and daydream. Leopardi paints Mt. Vesuvius as a monument to the slaughter that nature unleashed upon the inhabitants near that mountain almost 2000 years ago, and as an uninhabitable wasteland for mankind in the present. Even the animals on Mt. Vesuvius seem to share Leopardi’s paranoia:

“La Ginestra” is a testament to the pitiless rancor of nature. The sole caring thing in nature is la ginestra, or the broom, which Leopardi personifies as a seeker of desolate places, not unlike himself. Leopardi succinctly attacks the very ideals that Wordsworth seemed to hold as tenets of his faith: the sublimity of the imagination of man and the peace and tranquility inherent in nature, all of which will become apparent to the reader after the examination of Wordsworth’s poetry below. The following passage from “La Ginestra” seems to be almost exclusively addressed to Wordsworth:

These lines could have been a veritable attack against Wordsworth’s philosophy, but for that they probably never knew of each other, since neither was known well in the other’s homeland. Still, Leopardi is addressing those who would elevate the station of mankind above nature, much as Wordsworth did. Wordsworth probably would not approve of our current abusive relationship with the environment. Nature has never been so subjugated by mankind as it is today. While it probably won’t last, most of us enjoy relative freedom from the tyranny of nature. Leopardi would have approved, on the other hand, as the following lines suggest:

Leopardi denigrates the state of man almost as powerfully as Wordsworth elevates it. Thought, Leopardi writes, is what almost saved mankind. Almost; since he perceived man still to be in the dark. Leopardi wanted man to battle nature, although he acknowledged that death ultimately makes mankind the loser. Any attempt to view nature as a benefactor would be turning one’s back on a mortal foe. He denounces the so-called “Romantic” movement against enlightenment empiricism as foolish. Leopardi did not consider the sublime as evidence of the elevated station of man. He believed the sublime taught us how insignificant we are. Our only saving grace is to acknowledge our weakness, and not “turn our coward’s back on the light.” Only by treating nature as an awful enemy can we make the best of our lowly state. Though Leopardi and Wordsworth did not know of each other, this poem seems directed against Wordsworth and his ideals specifically. Some label Leopardi a Romantic, but his philosophy is anything but romantic.

Having highlighted Leopardi’s pessimistic view of mankind and outright fear of nature, I will now discuss Wordsworth’s opposing philosophy. The relationship between man and nature is the fault line at which Leopardi and Wordsworth split in opposite directions. Wordsworth, for all his education (he graduated from Cambridge, after all), espoused in The Prelude that nature is the best teacher. He believed that by seeing, hearing, and otherwise experiencing nature in places conducive to arousing the sublime in the recollected images of nature (such as the area north of Tintern Abbey and the Lake District), people, especially those such as himself, who possess a “glorious faculty / Which higher minds bear as their own (The Prelude, 13.90).” Leopardi’s biting sarcasm in these lines bespeaks the bitterness of one who has faired socially little better than the broom, with perhaps less companionship

The best example of Wordsworth’s reverence for nature, and the natural sublime can be found in “Tintern Abbey”. Consider the following lines:

The valley takes on an aspect of the sublime here because the cliffs have given an impression to the narrator of a deeper seclusion, thus increasing the sense of vastness around him. Also, the cliffs have seemingly connected the land and the sky to form one vast horizon; this triggers a mental image of what Burke would have called the artificial infinite. The artificial infinite is an optical illusion of infinity, such as a multitude of trees that stretch beyond sight. The imagination thus multiplies the trees to infinity, since they appear to be infinite[3]. The landscape and the sky are not one vast object, but they appear to be, and thus they trigger sublime sensations as if they were. Even the narrator himself, presumably young Wordsworth, is posed in a way that suggests unity with his surroundings. As we shall see in the lines directly following, he lies under the tree, his body following the contour of the ground, and perhaps part of the tree as well. Thus, he seems even more connected to nature. This illusion of the narrator and the landscape being one unified mass creates a sense of connectedness that also reaches out and makes the observer feel connected as well, and thus he enters a trance-like state, as we shall see later in lines 24--50. Paradoxically, in its vastness the scene makes the narrator feel secluded and connected to the universe at once. This paradox lies at the heart of the sublime. Lines 8--23 of “Tintern Abbey go on to inspire the sublime by suggesting the infinite:

The sublime is inspired in the narrator, and therefore in us, based on the Burkean assertion that objects that are unfinished, young, or otherwise ripe with untapped potential inspire the imagination to behold the infinite. In his A Philosophical Enquiry, Burke wrote that “Infinity, though of another kind, causes much of our pleasure in agreeable, as well of our delight in sublime images. The spring is the pleasantest of the seasons; and the young of most animals, though far from being completely fashioned, afford a more agreeable sensation than the full grown; because the imagination is entertained with the promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in the present object of the sense (70).” Therefore, the unripe fruits inspire one to imagine the perfect fruit that they might become; we do not have to be satisfied with the image of the ripe fruit, which could never match the imagined image, since the imagination is the seat of the sublime. Wordsworth credits the beauty of nature with inspiring the sublime in the imagination. Thus, the beauty of the Wye Valley had the power to invoke the sublime. Burke’s and Wordsworth’s views on the sublime intersect more closely than elsewhere here, since Burke associates terror with the sublime more closely than Wordsworth does. Likewise, the green hue of the woods and copses suggest fertility and the infinite potential of nature, and thus they too evoke an aspect of infinity, and thus the sublime, in the imagination. Wordsworth describes the orchard tufts as losing themselves among the woods; and the effect is a sense of connectedness. This is a persistent theme in this poem, and indeed in nature. Just as the landscape seemed to connect with the sky in line 8, here too the landscape seems to meld together. The hedge-rows also seem to seek connection with the woods. They are “hardly” hedgerows, so they are perhaps more like wild, uncultivated plants, like the trees in the forest. The farms are green to the very door. Thus, they are almost drawn into the forest, and join the rest of the scene in communion. The ground itself is “cottage-ground”. The cottage and the earth are connected syntactically as well as literally and figuratively. Even the absence of people, to explain the presence of wreathes of smoke or cottages inspire an aspect of the sublime. For, once again, we are not forced to settle for the visual representation of these mysterious folks. Rather, we may imagine the ideal cottage-dwellers and hermits, living in harmony with nature, as perhaps Wordsworth wanted us to do. Like the landscape and the quiet of the sky, the land, cottage and people all seem to meld into one union. The poem suggests that mankind should live as close to nature as possible, so as to experience the natural sublime, and thus become “more fit / to hold communion with the invisible world (The Prelude, 13.104--105).” It is necessary to place a caveat here; within the above lines, it would be easy to confuse the sublime with the merely beautiful. While I do not doubt that this pastoral scene was beautiful, it is more important to take into account the concept of infinity inherent in the potential of the valley. As I mentioned in the discussion of lines 18-23 above, the beauty of the Wye valley harbors an infinite potential to invoke the sublime in the imagination. The fruits were lovely to behold I am sure, but what is sublime in them is their potential. The beautiful has its own place in Wordsworth’s poetry, apart from the sublime. While the sublime challenges the imagination to apprehend things infinite, the beautiful lends its tranquility to the observer, as the narrator of “Tintern Abbey” is soothed by beauty of the valley. As the narrator, presumably Wordsworth, takes in more of the beauty around him, he is aroused to a sublime state, not unlike a trance. M.H. Abrams distinguishes between the sublime and the beautiful in Natural Supernaturalism:

[T]he ‘sister horns that constitute [nature’s] strength,’ whose ‘twofold influence…of peace and excitation’ instills in the mind a union of ‘emotion’ and ‘calmness,’ of ‘energy’ and ‘happy stillness.’ Of one type are gentle and ‘fearless’ aspects of nature- the calm and ordered prospect, small-scale objects, ‘quiet Heavens,’ ‘tranquil scenes,’ ‘gentle breezes,’ ‘a garden with its walks and banks of flowers,’ all of which manifest ‘love’ and ‘tenderness,’ act by effecting ‘pleasure and repeated happiness,’ and move the mind by ‘feelings of delight.’ But ‘Nature…when she would frame / A favor’d Being’ alternates her ‘gentlest visitation’ with ‘severer interventions, ministry / More palpable.’ Of this opposite type are the awe-inspiring and terrifying aspects of nature- vast scenes of wildness and majesty, the ‘awful’ and the ‘grand,’ elements ‘in tumult,’ ‘the midnight storm,’ ‘the roaring ocean and waste wilderness,’ which act on the mind by ‘terror’ and by ‘pain and fear’ and manifest not nature’s ‘love’ but her punitive actions: her ‘impressive discipline of fear’ (97).

Thus, the beautiful and the sublime are the two faces of nature. Wordsworth as well as Burke attributed the sublime as the stronger of the two, although the sublime cannot be inspired without the teaching and inspiration of the beautiful in nature. The sublime is fostered by nature, but its ultimate seat is the imagination. Following this logic, the hedge hid the horizon from sight in “The Infinite”, and therefore caused Leopardi to conjure up a sublime mental image of the sky and beyond.

Here in “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth is not faced with the fruit as it would one day be in its ripe state; by the virtue that it is not yet ripe, he is left to imagine the perfect ripened fruit. Burke, as we noted earlier, shared this opinion of the charm of things unfinished, such as unripe fruit and young animals. Thus, things that leave a greater portion for the imagination to construct are more sublime by the nature of the sublimity of the mind. The same holds true for everything in the valley that is left to the imagination, as we discussed earlier. Wordsworth describes his meditation on these recollections on the natural sublime in the following lines.

Wordsworth describes a communion between his imagination and nature here. It is important to note that Wordsworth does not commune with nature at the moment that he perceives it. Rather, he reflects on his recollected images of nature. As we noted earlier, Leopardi’s own self-described techniques in crafting the sublime in poetry were almost identical to Wordsworth’s. Thus, Wordsworth’s views coincide with Kant’s assertion that the sublime can only manifest in the imagination. Wordsworth calls his images forms of beauty; it is worth noting that Burke saw no relationship between the sublime and the beautiful. The former is grounded in pain, the latter, pleasure. The beautiful has its own properties apart from the sublime, such as one surmises from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” in the passages wherein the harmony abundant in the Wye Valley seem to soothe the author. Their additional function is to provide imagery that inspires the sublime. Although the narrator describes the objects of the Wye valley as beautiful, they are not sublime themselves. They may invoke sublimity when conceived within his mind, because the mind itself lends these things sublimity. Just as in Platonic philosophy, wherein there exists a perfect version of all mundane earthly things in the realm of imagination, Wordsworth recollects the Wye valley as sublime, whereas when it is viewed with the eyes, it is merely beautiful. Here in lines 23--50, as in book 13 of “The Prelude” (quoted above), Wordsworth describes the all-important connection between the imagination and the sublime. Wordsworth invokes the subjunctive mood through much of this passage (he uses the word “may” twice), and this is important because the subjunctive is invoked to suggest potential, and thus the possibility of infinity. This is fitting because the potential of nature is all around Wordsworth here. He is in the Wye valley in July, so, as he describes in the beginning, the fruits are unripe, and the land is fertile. The seemingly infinite potential of nature in this season adds to the sense of infinity that the narrator perceives in the seeming connectedness of the mountain, sky, and cottage-ground. As we noted earlier, things that are left for the imagination to portray take on the sublimity inherent in the mind.

Scholar Herbert Lindenberger seemed to find the language in lines 23-50 of “Tintern Abbey” (quoted above) troubling. He suggests that Wordsworth’s language impedes the reader’s ability to follow the language of the poem. Lindenberger writes: “The probing, moreover, is constantly interrupted by qualifications and rhetorical back-tracking. Strong assertions are tempered by phrases such as “no doubt,” “I trust,” “if this be but a vain belief,” “somewhat of.” Through frequent use of negatives (fully seven of the twelve lines beginning with “That had no need of a remoter charm” contain forms of negation) he defines by a process of elimination (On Wordsworth’s Prelude, 56--57).” I contend that Wordsworth was less concerned with qualifying his assertions than he was with aiming for sublimity. As Pseudo--Longinus said, one of the most vital sources of sublimity is that infinite wellspring the imagination.[4] Wordsworth was being deliberately unclear in his speech so his readers would forced to create what he left unsupplied with their own imaginations. To turn once again to Pseudo--Longinus: “It is natural to us to feel our souls lifted up by the true sublime, and conceiving a sort of generous exultation to be filled with joy and pride, as though we had ourselves originated the ideas which we read (Aristotle, 143).” Thus, Wordsworth employed somewhat obscuring language as a technique in invoking the sublime, and the effect is that it leaves a more lasting impression on the mind of the reader. Another affect of the, as Lindenberger termed it, “interruptions” in lines 26--50 of “Tintern Abbey” is that they add to the sublimity of the passage by breaking up its rhythm, and therefore preventing it from becoming too frigid, as Pseudo--Longinus points out: “Nothing so much degrades the tone of a style as an effeminate and hurried movement in the language…Such abuse of rhythm is sure to savour of coxcombry and petty affectation, and grows tiresome in the highest degree by a monotonous sameness of tone. (Aristotle, 194).” The effect of the “interruptions” in “Tintern Abbey” is to prevent the verse from becoming too rigid and predictable.

The narrator describes his recalling of images of the Wye Valley when in towns and cities in the above lines, and it seems that even when he was far from it, he was connected to it and rejuvenated by it through his memories of the valley. This sense of connectedness adds to the sense of sublimity by making it seem that all, not just the landscape and the sky, but the narrator too, form one infinite whole. The narrator relates that in his trance-like state, he became a “living soul”. Thus all divisions are broken down. Sky, land, body and soul are all one, infinite being.

Wordsworth also depicts time with sublimity in “Tintern Abbey”. The abbey itself appears nowhere except for in the title of the poem; John J. Peters suggests that the reason the abbey cannot be seen is because had been reclaimed by nature, since it had fallen into disuse by the Catholic church after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. In “Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey”, Peters wrote: “the abbey’s stone courtyard and dilapidated structure have given birth to new life.” Roger N. Murray writes that the poem

gives to ‘this green earth’ [105] a height and depth of idea by establishing the color green as the outward counterpart of the moral regeneration of the speaker’ (30). This of course echoes Dante’s comment in the third canto of Purgatorio that hope is the color green. And this hopeful regeneration has at its back the overgrown structure of the abbey, giving the viewer a picture of rebirth and renewed life- in fact, life growing out of death…In ‘Tintern Abbey,’ the answer to life is found in the living- not living in the past in memory nor the state of frozen time…For Wordsworth, time is a necessary part of the human experience, and in the progression of time in human existence we find beauty and truth and meaning and ultimately- joy (77--78).”

Thus, time stretches out sublimely before and beyond human existence, and makes a boon of death and decay. Nature has reclaimed the abbey; it is overgrown and green, and home to animals, and perhaps even vagabonds. From this perspective, we may surmise that good may not only come from the decay of the abbey, but from our own decay. Time is both destroyer and regenerator, and reaches into perceived, if not true, infinity, and in its ceaseless power to bring life and death, it is sublime.

In line 43, Wordsworth writes, “the affections gently lead us on” (emphasis mine). For the first time in the poem, he uses a plural pronoun rather than a singular one such as “me”. Suddenly, it is not only the narrator who enters this trance, but someone else too. We learn later that he is with Dorothy, but I believe he meant all of mankind, not just Wordsworth and his sister. To support this, we may look at line 45, in which Wordsworth uses the phrase “our human blood”. The word “human” suggests humanity. Therefore, the reader is drawn into this union with nature. All this adds to the illusion of infinity, which is one of the most important aspects of the sublime, as we discussed earlier. Nature’s infinite potential to invoke the sublime is augmented to even include humanity here. Thus, the beautiful in nature, to include humanity, is the teacher, and inspirer, of the sublime.

Lines 27--36 of “Tintern Abbey” suggest that Wordsworth believed that objects of beauty can inspire goodness in people. This was actually a fairly standard supposition in the eighteenth century, and German philosopher Immanuel Kant shared this opinion. Henry Allison wrote, “In fact, the sublime (like the beautiful) is viewed by Kant merely as a preparation for morality (Kant’s Theory of Taste, 42).” While Kant’s discussion of the sublime is ultimately more complicated and flawed than Burke’s, his commentary on the “artificial infinite” addresses the sublimity of the vast and great, which is an integral part of the artificial sublime.

Wordsworth has been called the first eco-critic, and it is true that his pastoral and anti-urban writings (such as Book Seven of The Prelude) do smack of environmentalism. Wordsworth would doubtless disapprove of the urbanization of much of our world and the technological maelstrom it has become.

It is amazing that Leopardi and Wordsworth both deployed the sublime magnificently, considering their opposite views of what the sublime teaches us. Although they disagree on man’s station, they both emphasize the power of the sublime. At times the term “sublime” can seem to be almost as encompassing as the term “Romantic”. Leopardi may view nature as a “heartless nurse”, and Wordsworth may view nature as “the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being (“Tintern Abbey”, 108--111), but the two authors agree on the ability of nature to invoke the sublime. By contrasting these two poets, their differences show up more brightly when viewed against the backdrop of the other, and one can more easily appreciate the extremity of their views. Wordsworth, who was reared in the bosom of nature, raised mankind to the level of divinity while circumventing Christianity through Nature. In “The Prelude” he suggested that encounters with the sublime in nature worked upon him and lent him his visionary powers. Although he usually wrote of an exchange between man and nature that creates the sublime in the imagination, he suggests in “The Prelude” that ultimately the mind of man is more sublime than anything else on earth. Giacomo Leopardi would have called Wordsworth, among other things, a coward. Leopardi’s youth was spent by candlelight, not sunlight. He learned, at a phenomenal pace, from books, not whimsical encounters with the sublime in nature. His philosophy is much more rigid and empirical than Wordsworth’s. His view of mankind is summed up in the following passage: “I say that the world is a league of scoundrels pitted against true men, of the vile against the good-hearted. When two or more unprincipled men meet for the first time, they easily, as if by sign language, recognize each other for what they are (A Leopardi Reader, 188).” As he tells us in “La Ginestra”, Leopardi thought it folly for men to take up arms against each other when nature is the true enemy. In seemingly all ways, he was the opposite of Wordsworth. He was unhappy, unlucky, a social failure, and hater of nature. Leopardi’s sublime teaches us how frail we are compared to tyrannous nature, and Wordsworth’s sublime teaches us that we are the equal, even superior of, beneficial nature. There is only one common denominator in their theories of the sublime: the true faculty that is responsible for the sublime is the imagination. Leopardi nearly terrifies himself with his imagination in “La Infinitivo”. He tells us that because the hedge hides the horizon, his mind is forced to paint the picture of the sky. His imagination moves him in a way that his eyes could not. In “Tintern Abbey”, Wordsworth admits disappointment when he is confronted with the mundane image of the Wye Valley that his eyes supply. He even seems to have his eyes closed in the first few lines of the poem. Not in “Tintern Abbey” or “The Prelude” does Wordsworth attribute the greater part of sublimity to nature. It is when he is out of sight of nature that he reflects upon his sublime recreated images. This is the crossroads at which Leoaprdi and Wordsworth part ways: Wordsworth embraces the sublime, and the divinity of man in it, and to Leopardi the sublime is a call to arms against his mother: nature.

[1] Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Taste.

[2] “Leopardi and the Romantic Sublime”, pg. 51

[3] Burke, 43.

[4] Aristotle, 169.