Mentorship and the Sublime: Finding Voice in the Tradition of Burke, Kant, and the Romantics

When we think of aesthetic philosophy, it is often tempting to leave the discussion in the realm of the abstract, with figures like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant developing their theories in dense treatises rather than in the lived textures of art. Yet when we turn to Romantic poetry—particularly the work of poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley—we find that these philosophical currents do not remain theoretical abstractions. They become embodied, dramatized, and contested in verse. Chief among these aesthetic ideas is the concept of the sublime, that peculiar blend of awe, terror, and transcendence that Burke explored in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and that Kant later refined into his Critique of Judgment. In poetry, the sublime exists through roaring waterfalls, windswept mountains, storm-tossed seas, and the dizzying vastness of the night sky.

Burke’s notion of the sublime emphasized the overwhelming and even frightening qualities of experience. Vastness, obscurity, and power were central to his account, and in these qualities he found something more intense than beauty, an experience that shakes us out of complacency. Kant, in contrast, pushed the sublime further into the realm of reason, suggesting that the mind recognizes its own capacity to transcend sensory limits when confronted with immensity. Both thinkers shaped the intellectual climate in which the English Romantics were writing, and the poets absorbed these ideas into their own creative experiments. Wordsworth’s accounts of mountain landscapes in The Prelude, or Coleridge’s descriptions of supernatural power in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, show how literature takes philosophical speculation and incarnates it in language that moves the reader emotionally.

Literature gives us access to this aesthetic philosophy by inviting us to stand at the edge of an abyss, to hear the thunder of invisible forces, to sense our own smallness against the background of nature or eternity. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” is an especially rich example: here the mountain is a symbol of the vast, indifferent power of the universe. The poem trembles between awe at the beauty of the landscape and recognition of its terrifying indifference to human life. This tension reveals the sublime at work: an encounter with something that resists containment, that makes us feel our limits and yet stirs in us a recognition of our imaginative power.

For writers today, engaging with the sublime can be both exhilarating and daunting. How does one capture immensity or awe in language that is necessarily finite? How can a writer summon a sense of overwhelming scale or spiritual intensity without resorting to clichés? These are not trivial questions, and they reveal the way philosophical concepts press upon the practice of literary creation. It is here that the role of mentorship becomes especially valuable. An experienced author or writing coach can help a developing writer navigate the delicate balance between evoking grandeur and falling into exaggeration. They can guide a poet, for example, to see how Coleridge used shifts in rhythm to mimic the rise and fall of waves, or how Wordsworth drew on the precise observation of nature before allowing his language to swell into rapture. Such mentorship brings the abstract back into the realm of craft, showing how the sublime can be achieved not only by the force of imagination but also by carefully honed technique.

Consider how this works in practice. A young novelist trying to depict a storm at sea may be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the image. Left alone, the writer may either dilute the effect into something merely picturesque or exaggerate until it becomes melodramatic. A mentor, however, can offer feedback that reframes the task: focus on the single image of the mast groaning under pressure, the sound of the timbers splitting, the cry of one sailor against the roar. By drawing attention to detail and encouraging restraint, the mentor teaches the writer that the sublime often emerges not from describing everything at once, but from choosing images that hint at the scale without exhausting it. The literary sublime becomes attainable through such guidance, rather than remaining a distant philosophical ideal.

This guidance is not limited to writers of nature poetry or Romantic pastiche. Contemporary literature, whether in speculative fiction, memoir, or experimental prose, still grapples with the sublime. Science fiction writers often depict the infinite scale of space, postmodern novelists play with the dizzying complexity of texts within texts, and personal essayists evoke the sublime in the intimate but overwhelming dimensions of grief or love. Each of these efforts draws upon the same aesthetic principles that fascinated Burke and Kant. Each also poses the same challenges of scale, intensity, and expression. Author mentorship becomes a way of grounding the writer in a tradition while also encouraging them to adapt the sublime for their own context.

At the same time, the mentor can help the writer resist the temptation to mimic the Romantics without reflection. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, the sublime often pointed to a spiritual or transcendent dimension. For a contemporary writer, that may no longer hold. A mentor can prompt critical questions: What does the sublime mean in a secular world, or in a digital one? How does a writer evoke awe when readers are accustomed to images of superstorms or galaxies on their phone screens every day? By asking such questions, mentorship ensures that the sublime is not simply recycled but reinterpreted, made vital for a new generation of readers.

The sublime began as a philosophical category, found poetic expression in the Romantics, and continues to evolve as writers reinterpret its possibilities. What remains constant is the challenge: how to render the immensity of experience in the smallness of language. Author mentorship offers one of the surest ways to meet that challenge, guiding writers to study the past while discovering their own voice within it. In this way, the sublime is something a writer portrays, and also something they experience in the act of writing itself—the sense of being dwarfed by the task, yet finding within that very confrontation the exhilaration of creative power.