The sublime orator, the sublime poet, the sublime critic, is a man wildly lost in his own art, hurried out of himself, heedless, rash, wrong-"they burn all before them as they are carried along!"" Longinus insists on ecstasy, on genius spinning out of control, like the Rhine or the Danube or even Mount Aetna, "whose uprushings send rocks and whole riverbanks from down below and pour out rivers of that weird, spontaneous, earthborn fire."
— Anne Carson, Decreation