BURKE, EDMUND
Burke, Edmund: translation
(1729–1797)
Irish thinker and politician. After his education at Trinity College, Dublin, Burke lived by writing in London, until becoming a Member of Parliament in 1766. His first important work, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), marked a very early Romantic turn away from the 18th-century aesthetic of clarity and order, in favour of the imaginative power of the unbounded and infinite, and the unstated and unknown. Although he supported both Irish and American revolution, his later work Reflections on the Revolution in France is a masterly attack on the danger of airy political abstractions, and a defence of the preservation of traditional liberties, rights, and privileges.