SOURCE: Rogers, Pat. “Shaftesbury and the Aesthetics of Rhapsody.” British Journal of Aesthetics 12, no. 3 (summer 1972): 244-57.

In this essay, Rogers explores the reasons for Shaftesbury's use of the word “rhapsody” in the subtitle of his treatise The Moralists, arguing that the philosopher was responsible for the positive association of the term in relation to aesthetics.

One of the cheats of time is to rob us of surprise. History acts as a buffer against that sense of shock which contemporaries, lacking such insulation, must often have felt. For the literary student this attenuation of the unexpected affects—and distorts—judgement in several ways. Among the more serious results there is our failure to recognize linguistic shock tactics whenever they appear in literature of the past. Some verbal collocations which must once have produced a violent jolt in the reader's mind slip unnoticed through our consciousness. Fielding's ‘comic epic in...