...Warren Taylor Copyright © 1954 by Duke University Press 1954 A LETTER TO LONGINUS Warren Taylor Y DEAR SIR: I hope that the convention of dating letters does not trouble you, for we humankind still often find it difficult to know just where we are in time. By the Greek reckoning of Timaeus...

... historically, the term has acquired specific meanings that, I believe, directly contradict Pound s aesthetic. Mauberley does qualify this term. E. P., he tells us, wishes to maintain the sublime / In the old sense. Probably the oldest sense we know is Longinus s. In an early letter to William Carlos...

... the connotative range of a term like sublime. Nevertheless, the book rewards tolerance, and for those who can overlook its few deficiencies, there is a concise and masterly tracing of religious sublimity to its origins in Boileau s Longinus, in admiration and imitation of biblical style and subjects...

... of the Cassandra voices, is neither regrettable nor deeply alarming. One almost feels that Aristotle and Longinus, Castelvetro and Scaliger, Boileau and Sainte-Beuve, Johnson and Coleridge, amused, shocked, or bewildered as they may be at the agilities and heresies of their successors, can hardly resist a discreet...

... and Pliny s indolent people were occasionally justified in believing that it is best to say nothing at all. There is a great deal more in the Poetics that cries out for transcription here, but at least a little space must be reserved for Longinus s On the Sublime (W. Rhys Roberts translation). Who...

... rhetorical devices, especially repetition, unfortunately becomes characteristic of H. D. s later work. 16 Longinus in his essay On the Sublime isolates a further quality of Sappho s poetry: the selection and combination of the most striking details in the thing presented. This is fundamental to Pound s...

... matter, and the sympathetic handling of that subject matter. Children as main characters in poetry? Children who could feel, who had strong sen­ sibilities, and who could win the sympathy of adults? This will never do! Along with idiot boys and asses left ears what would Aristotle say? Horace? Longinus...

... of his delight in reading old books. With remarkable tolerance Longinus sug­ gested that each reader would find his own pleasure in his reading, without help from the critics, but he might have added that the reader should have an idea of the reason for his choice of the good. And this reason should have...

..., Galeti, Hippocrates, and Longinus; so that, when the Estiennes of Paris came to Italy, they found only Anacreon, Maximus, Tyrius, and Siculus, unedited. Aldus had sent forth Latin and Italian books also; the Etna and Asolani of Bembo, collections of Poliziano, the Divine Comedy, Cose Volgari of Petrarch...

... Erskine, Speeches; Oliver Gold­ smith s prose; Johnson, The Adventurer, The Idler, The Rambler, Preface to Shapespeare, Lives of the Most Emi­ nent English Poets; Longinus, On the Sublime, translated by William Smith; Plutarch, Lives . . . , translated by Lang­ horne; Pope, Preface to Homer, Preface...

...), in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, 1963), 11. 70-73. Subsequent quotations of Pope s poetry will be from this text. 21. In Elledge, 1:407-408. Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory 191 into it by Homer. 22 In fact, Longinus, whose influence on eighteenthcentury writers is widely known, had...

... treatise by Longinus had already been discussed in Soviet publications and was published in translation a year later.24 The Stalinist system not only subordinated traditional aesthetic categories to ideology, but also neglected to analyze them or even to consider them notions worthy of scientific...

... of Aristotle to denounce Wolfe, comparing him to Aristotle s horrible example of a bard who included all the adventures of Heracles in his epic poem, thereby failing to achieve any form. Tate, not to be outdone, condemned Wolfe and the contemporary lyrical novel by calling on the ancient critic Longinus...

... for critical platitudes. We are informed that Longinus is one of the most significant figures in the history of criticism (p. 139), that The critic of literature will always give a high place to the work of Addison and Steele (p. 63) and that Tom Jones is perhaps the greatest single novel we possess (p...

..., was reduced to visible size, held, even yoked. Then Aristotle, Longinus, the Alex­ andrian rhetoricians, the critics of the Italian Renaissance; and always artisans were passing their discoveries to young apprentices (often with elaborate secrecy) in manuals of rhetoric, directions for the mixing of pigments...

... world, a vision in which that world of savage beasts, fragile men, was reduced to visible size, held, even yoked. Then Aristotle, Longinus, the Alex­ andrian rhetoricians, the critics of the Italian Renaissance; and always artisans were passing their discoveries to young apprentices (often...

... volume to the Graeco-Roman. Mr. Atkins gives enough atten­ tion to the major figures, Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, without at all slighting the lesser ones. After a note on texts and translations at the beginning of each chapter he proceeds to a definition and explanation of the critic s work...

... of the plot). Dante speaks of local color. (It has been told in that). Longinus says to keep the metaphors to the same scale as the thing described and so to keep the telling of the story within a feeling of reserve power or control. I think you will find that in Uncle Good s Girls. I would like to see what...

... in Hebrew and some Greek in Josephus, or some variation. Rising from three o clock to six o clock, he disciplined his mind in Hebrew and Greek. Rarely does he mention a title, but he read from Anacreon, Cassius Longinus, Herodian, Homer (Odyssey), Josephus, Pindar, Plutarch, and Thucydides. During the day...