Abstract
Keats’s concept of the sublime pathetic, articulated in the margins of his copy of Paradise Lost, is explicated through Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays on the beauties, sublimities, and defects of Milton’s poem. Milton’s image of Satan as a giant sunspot recurs in Keats’s figure of Hyperion as “a vast shade / In midst of his own brightness” and is examined here against the background of Galileo’s Macchie Solari and the “maculae” of Horace’s Art of Poetry, both of which are invoked by Addison in his reading of Paradise Lost. The eighteenth-century discourse of sublimity draws on the concept of pittura à macchia (or spot painting), an aesthetic that turns blots and defects into “freer beauties” and hence signs of a higher form of beauty.
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Notes
- 1.
All citations of Keats’s Paradise Lost markings and marginalia refer to Lau. This material is now available in the new digital format discussed by Daniel Johnson in Chap. 5.
- 2.
Milton’s working notebook containing his early notes for Adam Unparadised is held by Trinity College Library, Cambridge University (R.3.4). On the relation between drama and epic in Paradise Lost, see Coiro, who helpfully historicizes the scholarship.
- 3.
The series was published weekly from January 5 through May 3, 1712, in The Spectator: nos.267, 273, 279, 285, 291, 297, 303, 309, 315, 321, 327, 333, 339, 345, 351, 357, 363, 369. For elaboration of this claim, see Gigante, “Milton’s Spots.”
- 4.
This and all other unacknowledged translations of Latin and Italian are my own.
- 5.
By contrast, Milton wrote Paradise Lost during a period known as the Maunder Minimum (named after the astronomer E. Walter Maunder) when, for reasons no one could explain, the sun suddenly threw off its spots and shone virtually spot-free for over half a century—that is, from the mid-seventeenth through the early eighteenth century (or around the time that Addison was writing his papers on Paradise Lost). See Eddy. There was some very minor intermittent activity: for example, on April 27 and on May 25, 1660, Robert Boyle observed sunspots (Cassini). Hevelius and Martin Fogel observed a few more the next year; and Robert Hook and Giovani Domenico Cassini saw some in August 1671 (“New Observations”).
- 6.
For more on existentialism in Keats, see Gigante, “The Endgame of Taste.”
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Gigante, D. (2022). Seeing Spots: Milton, Addison, Keats, and the Emergence of the Sublime Pathetic. In: Lau, B., Kucich, G., Johnson, D. (eds) Keats’s Reading / Reading Keats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79530-6_9
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