Burke's Theory Concerning Words, Images, and Emotion
Edmund Burke's youthful essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, first published in 1757, sets forth a theory that the impassioned language of poetry and oratory may rouse emotion without the entry of any clear images into the mind. This proposal—audacious if read by the light of the Augustan sunset, but prophetic of romanticism—has received occasional notice from historians of criticism because it anticipates Lessing's brilliant attack upon Wortmalerei in Laokoon (1766). But the way in which Burke seems to have invented his theory from scraps of Locke and Berkeley, left on the battlefield where the contest over abstract ideas had once been waged, has gone apparently unnoticed.