SOURCE: "Longinus at Colonus: The Grounding of Sublimity," in The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory, Yale University Press, 1983, pp. 47-80.

Below, Fry uses Sophocles's Oedipus as a touchstone to compare Longinus and Aristotle. He concludes that the former discards fundamental distinctions—e.g., language and spirit—that are fundamental and problematic in the Poetics of the latter.

The capacity to be able to act theoretically is defined for us by the fact that in attending to something it is possible to forget one's own purposes.… Theoria is a true sharing, not something active, but something passive (pathos), namely being totally involved in and carried away by what one sees [Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method]

In undertaking to show the relevance of Longinus to the concerns of criticism at the present time, it may be useful to begin by considering opinions of his treatise that...