Sensibility in literature and the transition to the Romantic Age
- Sensibility and the discussion of it is most prominent in the novel, but it is dealt
with in poetry as well.
- Elizabeth Carter wrote an Ode to Melancholy in 1739, indulging in feelings of
"sweetly-sad" mourning and sorrow. William Collins in his Ode to Fear (1749)
also personifies and addresses said feeling.
- Both melancholy and fear tie in with Edmund Burke's idea of the sublime. He
wrote A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful (1757), in which he argues that the power of feeling to fill the mind
completely and drown out reason gives rise to the sublime. The effect of the
sublime is astonishment in such a degree that all else is suspended, the mind
robbed of its powers and filled with emotion.
- Hannah More titled a whole poem Sensibility (1782),
praising it as a secret and natural power, true, moral
and subtle, an exquisite perception, which "eludes the
chains of definition".
- The heyday of sensibility was over in the 1790s. There
were reactions against it on aesthetic, moral, and also
political grounds. Jane Austen wrote her first draft of
Sense and Sensibility in 1795. Published in 1811, it is
probably the most famous novel concerned with and
criticising sensibility.
- In a sonnett dating from 1797 Samual Taylor Coleridge
mocks the egoism of sensibility. In 1798 he and
Wordsworth published the Lyrical Ballads, which is
often considered marking the beginning of the Romantic
Age.
- The cult of sensibility can be seen as an anticipation of
Romanitcism. The Romantic movement placed an
emphasis on the emotional life of the poet and the
importance of capturing the true voice of feeling.
- However, there are important differences. The idea of emotion as the origin
of the ability to write poetry arises only with the Romantics.
Also there is no longer an emphasis on tender emotions of pity, grief and
nostalgia, which were crucial to sensibilit