Introduction

What kind of writing overwhelms the reader and seems to lift him above himself? This short book, written for a Roman friend, answers that the sublime is 'the echo of a great soul'. The author names five sources of the sublime, grand thought, strong passion, figures of speech, noble diction and dignified arrangement, and analyses with brilliance passages from Homer, Sappho, Plato and Demosthenes. It ends by asking, with real feeling, why his own age no longer produces great writers. It is one of the most impassioned works of Western literary criticism.