1It should be noted that Engell does not include Burke in his list of new rhetoricians, though he does mention that his net may be cast wide enough to include other writers. Howell barely mentions either Burke or Lowth, and in a manner consistent with his relatively apolitical perspective, Mehtonen adopts George Campbell as the ultimate theoriser of new rhetorical obscurity.↩

2The Lectures were first published in English translation in 1787. For a helpful though somewhat unsatisfying account of Lowth’s life and writings see Brian Hepworth, Robert Lowth (Boston, 1978). ↩

3In Lowth’s work ‘the critical criteria which were normally used for works of literature were applied to scripture’ (Tim Fulford, Coleridge’s Figurative Language (London, 1991), 83.↩

4See Hepworth, 44-45.↩

5In 1779 Lowth and Price engaged in a brief pulpit-pamphlet war over the interpretation of prophecy and the American revolution. For various texts relating to this controversy, see especially the sermon delivered on Ash-Wednesday, 1779, in Robert Lowth, Sermons, and other remains of Robert Lowth/Memoirs of the life and writings of Robert Lowth, with a new introduction by David A. Reibel (London,1995), and Richard Price, A sermon, delivered to a congregation of protestant dissenters, at Hackney, On the 10th of February last, Being the Day appointed for a general fast, To which are added, Remarks on a Passage in the Bishop of London’s Sermon on Ash-Wednesday, 1779, 2nd ed. (London, 1779).↩

6See Alston’s unpaginated, prefatory ‘Note’ to Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar 1762 (Menston, 1967).↩

7Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Introduction’, in Power & Consciousness, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien and William Dean Vanech, (London, 1969), 4.↩

8Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration (Manchester and New York, 1997), 85.↩

9Ibid. 66.↩

10Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology (Cambridge, 1993), 25.↩

11Clark, 128.↩

12William Bruce Johnson, ‘Introduction’, in Longinus On the Sublime, (Delmar, New York, 1975), xvi.↩

13D.A. Russell, ‘Longinus’ On The Sublime, ed. D.A. Russell (Oxford, 1964), xliv. See the introduction for a useful discussion of the questionable identity of ‘Longinus’.↩

14For example, John Hamilton has noted Boileau’s attempt to limit both Pindar’s and Longinus’ commitment to the persuasive power of obscurity ‘by interpreting… poetry’s obscurity as always concealing a clear and rational core’ (John Hamilton, 152).↩

15Timothy Clark and Jon Mee have discussed at length the complications involved in eighteenth-century considerations of the pre-reflective in their studies of inspiration and enthusiasm. See Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration, and Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm (Oxford, 1992).↩

16Mehtonen, 13.↩

17Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, 1899), 43.↩

18Ibid. 125, 123.↩

19Ibid. 97.↩

20Ibid. 97.↩

21Ibid. 83.↩

22Mehtonen, 61.↩

23Longinus, 61.↩

24D. A. Russell, ‘Introduction’, ix.↩

25Longinus, 137.↩

26D. A. Russell, xlii.↩

27Ibid. xlii.↩

28Ibid. xlv.↩

29John Hamilton, 214.↩

30Longinus, 139.↩

31Mehtonen 50.↩

32While the new rhetoric clearly represents a fulfilment of Quintilian’s desire to re-appropriate the former component of philosophy into the rhetorical tradition, the extent to which it re-appropriated ethics is more complex. Peter de Bolla argues that ‘the three major works of aesthetics published between 1757 and 1763, Burke’s Enquiry, Gerard’s Essay on Taste, and Kames’s Elements of Criticism, effect [a] transition from a discourse on the sublime which genuflects towards ethics to one which helps to produce, as much as it turns towards, psychology’ (Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime [Oxford, 1989], 13). The absence of ethics from rhetorical discourse in Quintilian’s day is thus replicated in the eighteenth century, but with a crucial difference related to the importance of Enlightenment scientific discourse. Thus Miriam Brody has observed that ‘[b]ecause Enlightenment rhetoricians conceived that prose might be ameliorative in society’s ongoing mission of reforming itself, one’s writing style was extricated in moral choices’ (Miriam Brody, ‘A Vindication of the Writes of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Rhetoric’, in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Maria J. Falco [University Park, Pennsylvania, 1996], 119).↩

33Mehtonen, 56.↩

34Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H.E. Butler, 4 vols. (London, 1921-22), 1.Pr.9, 2.15.34.↩

35Ibid. 2.15.3. ↩

36Ibid. 11.9.5, 12.9.3. The connection of obscurity (obscurum) and secrecy is made in 5.13.16 where Quintilian, discussing types of cases, states that ‘[t]here is also the type of charge which is known as obscure, where it is alleged that an act was committed in secret’.↩

37Ibid. 8.6.19, 9.1.21. ↩

38Ibid. 9.1.29. ↩

39Ibid. 5.13.38. ↩

40Ibid. 4.1.57. ↩

41Ibid. 4.2.64-65.↩

42Brody, 118.↩

43Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791-1819 (Oxford, 1984), 3.↩

44Hepworth, 140. Hepworth goes on to claim on the same page that the Short Introduction is about ‘what Wordsworth called “the language really used by men”’. It should also be noted that Hepworth’s is the only book-length biography of Lowth, and that he generally represents a more secular Lowth than other scholars.↩

45Lowth, Short Introduction, xiii.↩

46Hepworth, 136.↩

47Lowth, Short Introduction, 113 n and 138, xiv.↩

48Ibid. 29-30.↩

49Ibid. xiv, viii.↩

50See Carol Percy, ‘Paradigms Lost: Bishop Lowth and the “Poetic Dialect” in his English Grammar’, Neophilologus 81.1 (January 1997), 129-44. While Percy ‘charts’ the apparent contradictions in Lowth’s simultaneous criticism of errors in prose and approbation of errors in poetry, she ultimately provides little argument for why Lowth would have done so.↩

51Smith, 4.↩

52Lowth, Short Introduction, 9.↩

53Smith, 139. ↩

54Take Lowth’s intention in his Isaiah, for example, of being as clear as possible on the subject of Hebrew poetry, ‘a subject, which for near two thousand years has been involved in great obscurity, and only rendered still more obscure by the discordant opinions of the learned’. Lowth, Isaiah: A New Translation, 2nd ed. (London, 1779), iv.↩

55Lowth, Lectures, 1.123. ↩

56Ibid. 1.122, 185. ↩

57Ibid. 2.250. ↩

58Ibid. 1.368. ↩

59For a discussion of the clarity of didactic poetry see Lectures 2.176, and note the claim on 1.309 that ‘Reason speaks literally, the passions poetically’.↩

60Ibid. 1.330.↩

61Lowth, Isaiah, li.↩

62Lowth, Lectures, 1.78 n, 214.↩

63“Enigmatists may have been those whom we now call Poets; inasmuch as it is customary with poets to mingle enigmas and fables in their verses, and by which they obscurely indicate realities: for an enigma is no other than a figurative mode of expression” (ibid. 1.95-96 n). ↩

64Ibid. 1.259. ↩

65Ibid. 1.304.↩

66Timothy Clark, Tim Fulford, Scott Harshbarger and Nigel Leask have discussed Lowth in the context of both a ‘democratic’ familiarity of imagery and an association with orality which privileges the concept of clarity. But underlying Lowth’s promotion of clarity was a commitment to a positive obscurity. Familiar objects and clear language are, in the end, simply the best means for communicating obscurity. Lowth’s relationship with orality is equally compromised, for the basis of his analysis of Hebrew poetry in both the Lectures and Isaiah is the notion that knowledge of the pronunciation of Hebrew words has been lost. Consequently, his concept of Hebrew poetry is almost entirely literate, not oral. See Clark, 75; Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority (Cambridge, 1996), 222-224; Scott Harshbarger, ‘Robert Lowth’s Sacred Hebrew Poetry and the Oral Dimension of Romantic Rhetoric’ in Rhetorical Traditions, 199-214; and Nigel Leask, ‘Pantisocracy and the politics of the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads’, in Reflections of Revolution, eds. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (New York, 1993), 50.↩

67Lowth, Lectures, 2.94. ↩

68Furniss, 25.↩

69Weiskel, 24. Significantly, Weiskel adds on the same page: ‘[i]n the case of poetic imagery, however, it is notoriously difficult to draw a clear line between the image as perception and as a sign standing for the nonsensible or the unimaginable – a fact that accounts for a history of quarrels over what is or is not sublime’. ↩

70Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford, 2002), 1. ↩

71Balfour, 59. Balfour mentions on the same page that ‘[b]efore Lowth’s time, there did exist a considerable tradition in English letters that, especially in the Renaissance and in the age of Milton, associated prophecy with poetry’, but argues that Lowth was the first to offer a suspicion that this association could be grounded in a literary analysis of Biblical prophecy.↩

72Lowth, Lectures, 1.356-57.↩

73Ibid. 1.360. ↩

74For example, see ibid. 1.144 and Isaiah Notes 14-15.↩

75Lowth, Lectures, 1.200. George Campbell later echoed this assertion in his Philosophy of Rhetoric: ‘I know no style to which darkness of a certain sort is more suited than to the prophetical’. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (London and Edinburgh, 1776), 2.150.↩

76Lowth, Lectures, 1.246.↩

77Ibid. 2.65. ↩

78Ibid. 2.66, 1.247-48.↩

79Balfour, 72.↩

80Lucy Newlyn has initiated a discussion of the connection drawn by Lowth and Burke between obscurity and the aesthetics of indeterminacy, according to which a text’s resistance to closure ultimately underwrites the possibility of the reader’s freedom to question it. See Lucy Newlyn, ‘Questionable Shape’, 209-33. ↩

81Balfour, 74.↩

82Balfour, 75-6. Balfour’s discussion of the temporality of prophetic obscurity is based on a reading of Lowth’s grammatical evidence for the indeterminacy of temporal references, according to which in prophetic texts the past may referred to in the future tense, and vice versa.↩

83Lowth, Isaiah, lxxiii.↩

84Lowth, Lectures, 2.68. ↩

85Ibid. 2.86.↩

86Ibid. 1.48 my emphasis.↩

87Ibid. 2.312.↩

88Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993), 52.↩

89In an article on Blake and the ‘bounding line’, Matthew Green has explored Blake’s understanding of the relationship between obscurity and identity, though he does note that Blake also discusses the pleasure of shadows (Matthew Green, ‘Outlining the “Human Form Divine”: Reading Blake’s Thoughts on Outline and Response to Locke alongside Lavater and Cumberland’, European Romantic Review 15.4 [Dec. 2004], 511, 526).↩

90Smith, 146.↩

91Furniss, 19.↩

92John Hamilton, 199.↩

93Edmund Burke, ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful’ in Burke, 1.268.↩

94Ibid. 224.↩

95Ibid. 239.↩

96Newlyn, ‘Questionable Shape’, 217.↩

97Burke, ‘Enquiry’, 235.↩

98Paul Trolander, ‘Politics of the Episteme: The Collapse of the Discourse of General Nature and the Reaction to the French Revolution’, in The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Plummer Crafton (London, 1997), 108.↩

99Newlyn, ‘Questionable Shape’, 211.↩

100Burke, ‘Enquiry’, 234.↩

101Furniss, 120. The description of Satan is from PL 1.589-99.↩

102Burke, ‘Enquiry’, 234. ↩

103Newlyn, ‘Questionable Shape’, 227.↩

104Burke, ‘Enquiry’, 1.248.↩

105Ibid. 1.248-249, my emphases.↩

106PL 2.266-7. ↩

107Burke, ‘Enquiry’, 1.249. Frances Ferguson argues for the relation between obscurity and the forms of discomforting sensation which drive one to self-preservation which is implied in such passages: ‘[s]ublime objects create particular problems for the sensations - by presenting themselves as too powerful or too vast or too obscure or too much a deprivation for the senses to process them comfortably’ (Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime [London, 1992], 8).↩

108Burke, ‘Enquiry’, 1.249. The Milton quotation is from PL 3.380. My term ‘psylosophy’ invokes Coleridge’s suggestion of the term ‘psilosophy’ in a presentation copy of A Lay Sermon to John Gibson Lockhart (see LS, 244). By ‘psylosophy’ I refer to the increasingly scientific, philosophised interest in what we now call ‘psychology’ in the mid-eighteenth century, which often resulted in armchair speculations about the relation of the mind to nature, such as Burke’s Enquiry. This movement has its modern equivalent in loosely psychoanalytic literary scholarship with philosophical pretensions, like Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973).↩

109Scott Harshberger notes that ‘[f]ollowing Lowth, Blair attributes the special power of Hebrew sublimity to its perspicuity, derived from a “conciseness” of expression’ (Scott Harshberger, ‘Robert Lowth’s Sacred Hebrew Poetry and the Oral Dimension of Romantic Rhetoric’, in Rhetorical Traditions, 208). Likewise, M. H. Abrams discusses the effect ‘of a humilitas-sublimitas’ in which ‘as Lowth puts it, “the meanness of the image” and the “plainness and inelegance of the expression” are used with such “consistency” and “propriety” that “I do not scruple to pronounce it sublime”’ (M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism [New York, 1971], 398). This association of sublimity with clarity and plainness clearly complicates any attempt to subordinate the concept of the sublime to that of obscurity, and vice-versa. In any case, the implication is once again that plainness and simplicity are not neutral forms of natural discourse, but instead are the products of an influential artifice.↩

110Burke, Enquiry, 1.232.↩

111Ibid. 1.234.↩

112Ibid. 1.232.↩

113Ibid. 1.312.↩

114Ibid. 1.284.↩

115Ibid. 1.319, my emphasis.↩

116Ibid. 1.319.↩

117Thomas McFarland draws attention to this curious effect in a discussion of the symbol, where he quotes Karl Jaspers from Von der Wahrheit: “[t]he symbol is suspended when I grasp essential reality in it. If it becomes fixed and definite and turns into an object in the world, then it loses its essential reality. It collapses into a sign, a signification, into a metaphor” (Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin [Princeton, 1981], 407). ↩

118A useful place to begin such a reading is Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla’s The sublime: a reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory (Cambridge, 1996). Many of the pieces included in this text overflow from a consideration of the sublime to one of a conceptualized obscurity, and it is perhaps only the traditional priority of the concept of sublimity which obscures this reading. See especially the section from Clio; or a discourse on taste (1769]: by James Usher, 147-156.↩

119Frans de Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke (Oxford, 1996), 6. John Whale likewise notes that ‘Burke the political theorist and Burke the aesthetic rhetorician have often gone hand in hand’ (John Whale, ‘Introduction’, in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. John Whale [Manchester and New York, 2000], 6). By maintaining a more rhetorical rather than an aesthetic or philosophical account of the of the origins of Romantic obscurity, I mean in part to avoid the pitfall of reflexive Romantic self-replication identified by Paul Hamilton as a sort of ‘linguistic idealism’ in Romanticist studies of the language of the revolution debate: ‘[t]he familiar “crisis of representation”, the dilemma of logocentrism, the deconstruction of all material categories of the natural into arbitrary modes of legitimation – all betray a contemporary linguistic idealism which is bound to see Romanticism in what McGann calls its “own” terms’ (Paul Hamilton, ‘“A Shadow of a Magnitude”: The Dialectic of Romantic Aesthetics’, in Beyond Romanticism, eds. Stephen Copley and John Whale [London and New York, 1992], 16).↩

120Edmund Burke, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in Burke, 8.128. In his Reflections, Burke’s inversions of revolutionary light function as a deliberately inversive appropriation of Price’s language in his Discourse on the Love of Our Country. But as is the case generally in such metarhetorical attacks, the activity of reciprocal figuration (by virtue of which different writers take up and redeploy various transvalued figures from their opponents in order to invert their significance), Burke can’t help but become indistinguishable from Price: ‘[a]fter all, [Burke] does more than satirize Price; he also doubles him. For a moment he gleefully becomes Price, following him to the pulpit, citing his sermon at length’ (Anne Mallory, ‘Burke, Boredom, and the Theater of Counterrevolution’, PMLA 118.2 [March 2003], 227). Interestingly, John Faulkner notes that Price’s adoption of a prophetic rhetoric was particularly disturbing to Burke, who understood its obscure power (John Faulkner, ‘Burke’s Perception of Richard Price’, in The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Plummer Crafton, [London, 1997], 6).↩

121Burke, Reflections, 8.132.↩

122Ibid. 8.292-293.↩

123L.G. Mitchell, in the introduction to ‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’, in Burke, 8.294.↩

124Burke, ‘Letter to a Member’, in Burke, 8.297.↩

125Ibid. 8.302.↩

126Ibid. 8.332. It is interesting to note in this context that in On the Sublime, which (as Michael Meehan has remarked) is famous for its assertion that ‘great art could only flourish in a free society’, Longinus claims at the end of his text (in a language and with figures remarkably similar to those employed in relation to the French Revolution) that ‘[i]n an age which is ravaged by plagues so sore, is it possible for us to imagine that there is still left an unbiassed and incorruptible judge of works that are great and likely to reach posterity, or is it not the case that all are influenced in their decisions by the passion for gain? …Nay, it is perhaps better for men like ourselves to be ruled than to be free, since our appetites, if let loose without restraint upon our neighbours like beasts from a cage, would set the world on fire with deeds of evil’ (Unpaginated preface to Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth Century England [London, 1986)]; Longinus, 161). ↩

127Burke, Reflections, 8.89, 285, 114.↩

128Burke, ‘Preface to Brissot’s Address’, in Burke, 8.512.↩

129Burke, ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’, in Burke, 8.384.↩

130Ibid. 8.407.↩

131Burke, ‘Heads for Consideration on the Present State of Affairs’, in Burke, 8.402.↩

132Burke, ‘Observations’, 8.430.↩

133Burke, ‘Enquiry’, 231; ‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’, in Burke, 9.120.↩

134Ibid. 9.137.↩

135Burke, ‘Remarks on the Policy of the Allies’, in Burke, 8.480, 468.↩

136Burke, ‘Preface to Brissot’s Address’, 8.521.↩

137Burke, ‘Enquiry’, 1.232.↩

138Burke, ‘Letter to William Elliott’, in Burke, 9.41.↩

139Ibid. 1.42.↩

140Burke, ‘Letter to a Noble Lord’, in Burke, 9.147.↩

141Ibid. 9.148. This technique is reminiscent of ‘the conceit of recusatio, whereby the poet demonstrates his abilities while claiming his incapacity’ (John Hamilton, 108).↩

142Burke, ‘Letter to a Noble Lord’, 9.157.↩

143Burke, ‘First Letter on a Regicide Peace’, in Burke, 9.190-191.↩

144Burke, ‘Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace’, in Burke, 9.54.↩

145‘Accordingly, in the Odyssey Homer may be likened to a sinking sun, whose grandeur remains without its intensity. He does not in the Odyssey maintain so high a pitch as in those poems of Ilium. His sublimities are not evenly sustained and free from liability to sink; there is not the same profusion of accumulated passions, nor the supple and oratorical style, packed with images drawn from real life’ (Longinus, 67).↩

146Burke, ‘Letter to a Noble Lord’, 9.156. The quotation is from PL 2.625.↩

147Burke, ‘Second Letter on a Regicide Peace’, in Burke, 9.278.↩

148Burke, ‘Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace’, 9.86.↩

149Burke, ‘Third Letter on a Regicide Peace’, in Burke, 9.345.↩

150Ibid. 9.332-33 n (this quotation is from a correction Burke made in an MS fragment).↩

151Ibid. 9.96.↩

152Burke, ‘First Letter on a Regicide Peace’, 9.255.↩

153Burke, ‘Third Letter on a Regicide Peace’, 9.304.↩