The shifting sublime
A response to Elijah Perseus Blumov
Last month, published a manifesto1 detailing what he sees as the deep connection between the aesthetics of epic poetry and the aesthetics of heavy metal music, including some thoughts about why epic poetry isn’t written anymore. My commentary below is in no way a refutation of Blumov’s points; what I would like to provide, however, is a sense of perspective. His essay is structured around the idea that there is no reason why contemporary poetry can’t reclaim its heritage of the sublime—a heritage which has been taken up, perhaps surprisingly, by heavy metal music. But since I’m a critic engaged with ideas of the reception and interpretation of art forms in their cultural contexts, I’m immediately compelled to poke at his arguments with questions like these: why did poetry lose its heritage of the sublime? If there’s no reason why it can’t reclaim that heritage, then . . . why doesn’t it? What factors caused the situation that poetry finds itself in today?
Blumov attempts to address these questions in his essay, but I feel there is something lacking in his analysis; specifically, the idea that the sublime itself—which he interprets in light of Longinus’ critique of a Homeric sublime based on great and mighty deeds and a feeling of overpowering, transcendent, terrifying beauty—has changed; that it is understood differently in our own day; and that it manifests itself in different artistic media. No art form ought to be frozen in time; to do so would be to cast it into the yawning maw of the museum. The narrative arts are no different. They have changed through the centuries. Let us see how they have changed.
Speaking for myself, the sublime comes to me mostly through music—and especially instrumental music. I grew up listening to the standard 19th-century orchestral repertoire; when I was a teenager it was symphonic music, and not heavy metal, that served as the best source for the kinds of awe-inspiring emotions that Blumov describes in his essay. It’s therefore easy for me to map what he says about the sublime in music onto my own experience. I’m not very familiar with the kind of epic grandeur that he talks about in reference to the poetry of earlier times; perhaps I’m not familiar enough with the tradition of epic poetry. It’s certain that I’ve never heard it performed properly: part of me wonders if we can never really appreciate the poems of Homer, or the Norse and Saxon epics, unless we’re hearing them cantillated by a bard in a torchlit mead hall. I don’t know for sure—this is an important point, though, and I’ll develop it further in a little bit.
As I said, music has always been, for me, the chief repository of the sublime. In my late teens I expanded my palette to include progressive rock and the doings of the classical avant-garde. Some music that has captured the sublime for me: the second part of Philip Glass’ Music in Twelve Parts or “The Grid” from Koyaanisqatsi; The third movement of John Adams’ Grand Pianola Music; Several compositions by Godspeed You Black Emperor, including the first half of “Storm” and the entirety of “Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls”; some of Michael Gordon’s works, such as Yo Shakespeare or the end of Trance.2 This last one is notable because of the way it highlights a difference—a nuance—within the category of the sublime.
Trance is a dark, heavy, foreboding piece of music; if you listen to it you’ll find that it doesn’t provoke feelings of awe so much as fear. Coincidentally, this is quite in line with how the concept of the sublime was originally understood; Edmund Burke, in his Inquiry into the Origin of the sublime and Beautiful, said that the sublime included “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger [. . .] Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror.” The German and English Romantics developed this idea into the thought that “sublime” meant grand natural vistas, high mountains, the ocean . . . basically anything full of power and even danger but which was also beautiful. They believed that the grandeur exhibited by wild and untamed nature could also stimulate, in its viewers, a sort of spiritual grandeur which is akin that what Blumov sees in the poetic epics.
The terrifying / fearsome aspects of the sublime have appeared often in literature since the days of the Romantics. The fearsome sublime is most prominently displayed in the genre of gothic horror literature: in books such as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, in Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and especially in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, which take the idea of the sublime into an otherworldly realm—literally; his stories are populated by alien beings, monsters not of this world.
The kinds of poetic epics which Blumov cites are sometimes full of pagan gods, Nebelungs, Grendels . . . but they all seem to be part of the world as we know it, the everyday world; maybe these monsters and gods exist on a higher plane of reality, a spiritual plane perhaps, but they are still part of our world. Even Milton’s Satan exists as part of the universe we are also part of; and the gods of the Greeks all lived on a mountain a few dozen miles back of Thessaloniki. Besides, the sublimity of these epics derives from the doings of the people in the stories and not so much on the supernatural beings. In contrast, the Lovecraftian sublime gets its power from its focus on the monsters and demons, the egregores who make up the otherworldly cast of horrors with which the protagonists of his stories interact.
There is a profoundly important difference between the sublime as expressed in the old poetic epics (and in heavy metal as Blumov sees it) and as it is expressed in the Lovecraftian mythos: the old epics were in effect saying “there is grandeur and a terrible beauty in our world, the world we live in; we can partake of it,” but Lovecraft’s stories say “the grandeur and terrible beauty exist outside of our world, beyond our comprehension, and we will go mad if we are forced to think about it.” Furthermore, this new conception of the sublime implies that there is no sublime in our world: compared to Cthulhu all our mighty deeds are nothing.3 Therefore—and this is key—a pursuit of the sublime within the bounds of our own plane of existence is no more than a delusion and will never amount to anything.
If this is the “state of the art” in literature’s treatment of the sublime, is it then any wonder that poetry doesn’t have a Blumovian sublime mode anymore? Literature has moved too far away from the kind of sublime which is tied to this world and to the doings of the creatures of this world; and has instead moved into the territory of an otherworldly, fearsome sublime. Perhaps, then, if there is a reason poetry can’t be sublime anymore it is that such sublimity is outside the purview of the literary art as the art is understood these days.4
This is not to say that poetry couldn’t go back to those days; only that such a going back would be quite hard. Poets: can you handle the challenge? Only serious poets need bother trying. Wimps and posers, leave the hall. But there is another reason such an endeavor would be hard.
Literacy was a rare achievement during the days when the poetic epics of the Greeks and the Norse were being composed. Poems like these would be recited by bards who would regale the nobles and great people with their skill and artistry. I don’t know if the common people had access to this entertainment; they were probably at least aware of it and maybe even had their own versions of it. Any kind of grand, epic, sublime, and awesome adventure story would have been told like this, with the formal aspects of poetry—rhyme, meter, regular stanzas—allowing the bards to memorize lengthy works. This kind of narrative form existed as a product of its specific cultural situation; as that situation changed, new narrative forms were created but the old ones didn’t fully die out, as we will see.
As literacy grew the novel began its long ascendancy. The novel was a form of narrative exactly suited to a literate age; but as with all new inventions there were unintended consequences. The novel was not a public medium; every printed book served an audience of one. As far as I know there has never been a tradition of public readings of novels the way poetry used to be recited; certainly, families would have their read-aloud hour before bedtime but families are a much smaller audience than the company arrayed at a mead hall. Blumov writes, with some skepticism, about George Steiner’s idea that the lack of shared moral and metaphysical beliefs have detracted from poetry’s ability to speak universally; if Steiner is right, his theory would go a long way toward explaining the rise of the novel, which, as a more-or-less private text, can speak to a particular subculture in a way that a poetic epic cannot.
Now that we are in the age of recorded sound the situation has developed even further. When reading a novel one’s faculties are necessarily directed to the reading; it’s important to not be interrupted, to have quiet and privacy. With the advent of recording it has become possible to do more than one thing at a time. I used to paint while listening to Robert Fripp’s solo albums; driving, jogging, working, etc. are now all done to one’s own personal soundtrack. In today’s world this is an asset: hence music, the current dominant art form, is where we find much of the moods, ideas, feelings, and therefore sublimity, in the arts today.
Has our culture given up on the sublime—or has it merely engaged with the sublime using a different artistic medium? It is certainly true that there is no reason why a poetic epic cannot be written today;5 but such an epic would be of necessity outside the conventions of form as decided by our contemporary culture. Meanwhile, heavy metal, progressive rock, and the allied genres continue to attract serious creative talents.
I certainly hope that Blumov is right, and that poetry could reclaim some of its tradition and heritage of epicness and metallicity; to say of an art that some things are off-limits just seems such a betrayal of the whole ethos of art. And such a reclamation has been done before: Milton’s Paradise Lost was written centuries after the last great age of the poetic epic in English. But if poets do, in fact, attempt to write epics, I am afraid they will have a hard time preventing their works from becoming just another aspect of museum culture. Just like shape-note singing and English country dancing, epic poetry will collect a passionate circle of adherents whose interest in their chosen art form will go completely unnoticed by society as a whole.
Prove me wrong, poets, by your mighty works.
Here is a Spotify playlist containing all of the music mentioned in this paragraph. I would have also made a YouTube playlist but I couldn’t find the specific recording of Glass’ “The Grid” that I wanted.
This kind of sublime is also found in the Bible, in Numbers 13:33: “And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”
This would not be the only time literature has shifted in what it considers its highest goals and aspirations. Tom Wolfe found out the hard way that the social realism of writers like Dickens, Zola, and Dostoevsky, while still admired by readers in the late twentieth century, was too far out of fashion to be accepted by the literary avant-garde of his day; although his novels were all bestsellers and were very popular with readers, they never earned him any respect from his fellow writers.