Hybridity as a Response to Dualism: Thomas Warton and the Gothic Dilemma

Abstract: This paper traces the development of a hybrid aesthetic in Thomas Warton’s architectural poetry. The duality of the Gothic and the Classical was widespread in the eighteenth century, limiting Gothic architecture to particular experiences or faculties, such as the imaginative or the sublime. In order to rationalize his aesthetic experience, Warton increasingly regulates his own “Gothic enthusiasm” according to contemporary associations. Defining this Gothic enthusiasm in relation to poetic enthusiasm, I examine how it unfolds in “The Pleasures of Melancholy” (1747; revised 1755), then show how later poems regulate it through a system of dualities that reflects Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). In turn, however, the increasing rigidity of this system leads Warton to propose hybridity as a way to reconcile his dualities. This development sheds light on hybridity as a response to dualism and illustrates the aesthetic development that cultural understandings can imply—in this case, understandings of the Gothic and the Classical alongside a tendency towards rigid categorization.