Longinus and the Sublime

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521300087.057

55 - Longinus and the Sublime

from NEOCLASSICAL ISSUES: BEAUTY, JUDGEMENT, PERSUASION, POLEMICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

John Logan

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Glyn P. Norton

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Glyn P. Norton: Affiliation:
Williams College, Massachusetts

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Summary

Boileau published his Œuvres diverses in 1674, when he was thirty-eight. The volume comprises revised versions of poems already published as well as works seeing print for the first time. The most substantial of the newly published works, a translation of Longinus, is also the only one specifically named in the title: Œuvres diverses du Sieur D*** avec le traité du Sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours traduit du grec de Longin. An introductory text, ‘To the Reader’, accounts for the presence of the translation: ‘I originally made this Translation to instruct myself rather than with the intention of giving it to the Public. But I believed that people would not be offended to find it here following the [Art poétique], with which this Treatise has some relation, and in which I have even inserted several precepts that are taken from it.’ The modesty of this statement finds an echo in the ‘Préface’ to the translation itself (pp. 333–40). There, after presenting a brief anecdotal sketch of its presumed author, Cassius Longinus, Boileau says that the treatise manifests its author's qualities: ‘His sentiments have something about them that marks not only a sublime mind, but a soul that is far above the ordinary’. He therefore has no regrets about the time – ‘some of my evenings’ – he has spent translating such an excellent work, especially since he is in a position to say with confidence that ‘it has hitherto been understood only by a very small number of scholars’ (p. 336).

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 529 - 540

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300087.057 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1999

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55 - Longinus and the Sublime

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