The Seventeenth-Century Sublime: Boileau and Poussin

Abstract

This article summarises the key concerns of Pseudo-Longinus’s On the Sublime, and considers their interest for one of the most influential translators of the treatise, Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711). Boileau’s translation of the ancient Greek text is situated in the context of seventeenth-century French literature, looking particularly at the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns and seeking to explain why modern criticism has taken Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) as the sublime painter par excellence.