page_title: Beachy Head (poem)
section_title: The sublime
hierarchical_section_title: Beachy Head (poem) / Major themes / The sublime
caption_attribution_description: Beachy Head
context_page_description: Beachy Head is a long blank verse poem by Charlotte Turner Smith, first published in 1807 as part of the volume Beachy Head and Other Poems. The poem imagines events at the coastal cliffs of Beachy Head from across England's history, to meditate on what Smith saw as the modern corruption caused by commerce and nationalism. It was her last poetic work, published posthumously, and has been described as her most poetically ambitious work. As a Romantic poem, it is notable for its naturalist rather than sublime presentation of the natural world.
context_section_description: Modern feminist critics have emphasized Beachy Head’s shift toward the anti-sublime; however according to Kelley, this reading was propped up by Burkean aesthetics and supposes that a sublime viewpoint is male and god-like in its capacities, whereas a picturesque or beautiful perspective is lower, more involved, more shaped to the look of the land and its particulars. The aesthetics of particularity, whether beautiful or picturesque, might seem to offer a way for history or narrative to become less grand, more local, and perhaps more true. The fossils’ smallness also might qualify them as ‘‘sublime,’’ since Edmund Burke suggests that ‘‘the wonders of minuteness’’ may be like the wonders of vastness in their effect.
  Most significantly, fossils provoke feelings definitive of the sublime experience, such as wonder and a sense of incomprehension. In Beachy Head specifically, the fossils evoke not only the general range of geological controversies, but with increasing force through these decades, the deepening temporal description of the earth’s history, and the accompanying possibilities for epistemological uncertainty.
  Moreover, images of fossil sea-shells are made to provoke aesthetic instabilities which are not merely unresolved, but are actively assisted, by the poem’s larger structures. We must turn our attention, then, to what might be understood as an experiment, a self-reflexive testing of the picturesque and the sublime, and to the questions that experiment raises about the limits of these aesthetics. Wallace continues:
  The tiny fossils open into a meditation on the inefficacy of science and history from which cascades an epistemological crisis: if the empirical reasoning which underwrites not only science and history, but picturesque and sublime aesthetics, cannot trace our experiences in the present world back to their material causes, then what will replace that way of knowing.
caption: A modern view of Beachy Head
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