Absorbing Hesitation: Wordsworth and the Theory of the Panorama

The material sublime thus functioned both to discover and confirm the difference between the terms by establishing the relative value of each through their opposition: the material sublime worked to elevate sublimity by defining it as an aesthetic that appeals to the intellectual faculties at the expense of the base, corrupt (and corrupting) physicality of the panoramic.6 For example, Lamb applied the term material sublime to Martin's paintings, which he deemed the product, and in turn producer, of a "[d]eeply corporealized" mind, "enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality" (Elia 264) and the arch enemy of the interior, intellectual faculty of vision, the eye of the mind. The importance of abruptly moving from the realm of daylight into the darkness of the rotunda of the panorama at Leicester Square in order to thwart distinct judgments of distance and boundary is specified in Robert Barker's original patent for the technology that would become the panorama.22 The ways in which the effectiveness of the panorama as an aesthetic form are so directly tied to sensory experience, and the ways in which its popularity is so rooted in fantasies about how real the experience of those effects can be or are, complement the preoccupations of the simile of the cave in such a degree of strength as to be quite striking.