This essay suggests a reappraisal of the Sublime as a central category in the field of aesthetics and literary criticism, considering that structuralism is going through a critical phase. In the rhetoric of the Sublime, the reader, tradition and intertextuality are focused on again. Above all we have tried to point out that it is a dynamic category played out between the text and the reader. As PseudoLonginus had already suggested, the Sublime arouses in those who feel it sensations of both annihilation and elation. In Burke's Enquiry, too, the subject perceiving the Sublime becomes the focal point.
Burke analyses in detail the type of language needed to obtain the sublime effect.
In this respect, he is a forerunner of Romantic theories in making a distinction between a referential language and a poetic one. A poetic word is able to arouse sublime effects for it does not describe but suggests, and hence overwhelms the reader. A comparison between the two treatises by PseudoLonginus and Burke on the Sublime has enabled us to point out how a particular use of quotations can be found in both of them. The comparison between Burke and Kant must not be made only in relation to the sublime, but must be extended to the considerations that both philosophers make on beauty, and even before this to certain characteristics of their respective systems. In this line of thought Kant found the first formulation of that Mittelglied, that link between senses, intellect and reason which he sought insistently in the last phase of his caress.