A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is one of the most enduring analyses of our aesthetic concepts of the Beautiful and the Sublime, which he separates into completely different states. The sublime, says Burke, elicits feelings of terror and awe, while the beautiful elicits pleasure and serenity. He gives a phenomenological account of how these states arise and their relation to art of various sorts, in particular poetry.