When Words Strike Like Lightning: Longinus’s *On Sublimity*
Longinus may not have existed, but he left a mark
Sometimes a poem cracks open the sky.
That’s the kind of writing Longinus wants us to notice—what he calls the sublime. Not persuasive, not orderly, not even beautiful—but arresting. Dazzling. The kind of language that lifts us out of ourselves and leaves us momentarily suspended, breathless, above the world.
“Sublimity is the echo of a noble mind,” he writes. It strikes us not through reason but through its power. We don’t analyze it but feel it. And once we do, we’re changed.
Where Horace, in Ars Poetica, offers rules for coherence, control, and social polish—how not to bore your audience, how not to embarrass yourself—Longinus is drawn to those rare moments that break the rules entirely. Where Horace counsels decorum, Longinus exalts ecstasis. One seeks proportion. The other seeks elevation. It’s not that they’re opposed—many great poets manage both—but they are different modes of literary value. Horace wants you to write well. Longinus wants you to write like thunder.
Likely composed in the first century CE by an unknown author (“Longinus” is probably an erroneous attribution and has become what Foucault would call an “author function”), On Sublimity reads less like a polished treatise than a series of inspired notes: part rhetorical handbook, part literary manifesto, part philosophical reverie on greatness. There is no formal introduction and no clean conclusion. What it offers instead is a set of reflections on why some writing, at rare and unpredictable moments, becomes transcendent.
Sublimity, Longinus argues, is not simply a matter of subject or even technique. It is a force. “What is truly great,” he writes, “is always easy to believe. And what is great and sublime carries the audience along irresistibly.” We don’t respond with admiration. We respond with awe.
He identifies five sources of the sublime. First and most powerful is “grandeur of thought,” which cannot be taught but must be cultivated through moral strength and imaginative breadth. “Nothing makes for greatness in writing,” he insists, “as the power of noble thought.” That means the writer must be, in some essential way, great-souled. A narrow or petty spirit will never produce lofty words.
Second: strong and inspired emotion—not merely expressed, but lived. Real feeling, at a high pitch, can animate a line with more energy than craft alone can summon. Third and fourth: rhetorical figures used not mechanically but with intensity and spontaneity—questions, apostrophes, repetitions that feel as if they emerge naturally from the pressure of the moment. “Figures,” he writes, “are most effective when they appear to be used not artificially but as though prompted by the circumstances themselves” (142). They must feel necessary, not ornamental.
Finally, fifth: diction, metaphor, rhythm, composition. “A choice word or phrase,” he writes, “can be a kind of flash, lighting up the whole subject at a single stroke” (139). Sublime writing, then, is not a smooth surface but a jolt. The image Longinus returns to is lightning—a sudden bolt, stunning and instantaneous.
Still, Longinus is not advocating chaos. He ridicules overblown writing—language that swells with self-importance but has no weight. “The difference between height and inflation,” he notes dryly, “is often not recognized.” True sublimity doesn’t puff itself up. It elevates.
What’s extraordinary, though, and what made On Sublimity so influential in later centuries, especially the eighteenth and nineteenth, is how Longinus imagines literature not as instruction or pleasure, but as transformation. He’s not concerned with how poems mean—he’s concerned with how they strike. And in a passage that would thrill the Romantics, he makes an astonishing claim:
The effect of genius is not to persuade the audience but to transport them out of themselves. In fact, what is amazing always prevails over what merely pleases. … The sublime, wherever it occurs, lifts us near to the greatness of the gods.
This is the heart of it. For Longinus, the sublime is not just literary—it is quasi-divine. In moments of sublimity, the human poet approaches something godlike. “By some innate power,” he writes, “our soul is borne aloft by the true sublime; it takes proud flight, and, exulting in utter grandeur, is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself created what it has heard.” The reader doesn’t just receive greatness. The reader partakes in it. The soul becomes temporarily vast. The self expands.
It’s this vision—of the artist as creator, of the reader as co-elevated—that made Longinus so important to writers like Burke, Kant, and the Romantics. Here was a theory of literature that wasn’t just about beauty or utility, but about force. Ecstasy. Immensity. Awe. Even terror. On Sublimity becomes, centuries later, the seedbed for a whole aesthetic vocabulary of the sublime as overwhelming, excessive, beyond rational comprehension.
Unlike Horace, who warns against grandiosity and advises that “what’s right is not always attractive, and what’s attractive is not always right” (Horace 276), Longinus urges us to aim higher, to risk the ridiculous in pursuit of the immense. “Even when it fails,” he admits, “the attempt at the sublime is still greater than successful mediocrity” (141). It’s better to fall from a high place than to crawl safely across the floor.
Of course, this is dangerous advice. Most writers who aim for sublimity miss and land in nonsense, or even bathos. But for Longinus, the attempt itself is noble. “We cannot become great,” he says, “without struggling toward greatness” (140).
In the end, what Longinus gives us is not a method, but a horizon. He gives us permission to try for something immense. To take the risk of writing that flashes—sudden, blinding, and unforgettable.
And when it works, we feel it not in the mind, but in the body.
Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.
Longinus's vision of art is, dare I say it, sublime. Can author functions envision the sublime before the reader constructs them? Asking for an author.