A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

In Part 5, Burke analyzes the role of words in the beautiful and the sublime. Humans have multiple sources of pleasure. They can experience pleasure through nature, motion, architecture, and reason. All these stimulants of beauty and the sublime affect humans differently. Poetry, in particular, has a unique effect.

Burke suggests that poetry elevates the minds and concepts. Words are divided into three categories. The first are simple ideas, or aggregate words. These are united by nature and understood by very small children. Words like “tree” and “dog” represent simple ideas. The second category is simple abstract words, such as “red” or “square.” The third category is compounded abstract words. Burke suggests that this category is where the sublime lies for poetry, and it is also the most difficult for people to grasp: “Nobody, I believe, immediately on hearing the sounds, virtue, liberty, or honour, conceives any precise notion of the particular modes of action and thinking, together with the mixt and simple ideas, and the several relations of them for which these words are substituted” (130). Compounded abstract concepts are more difficult to understand, as they cannot be immediately physically represented.