Edmund Burke

I came across Burke through researching the Powell and Pressburger films.
This quote from George P Landow serves to describe the aesthetics and philosophy behind some commentator's explanation of Neo-Romanticism's ideals.
"In addition to the emphasis which he places on terror, Burke is important because he explained the opposition of beauty and sublimity by a physiological theory. He made the opposition of pleasure and pain the source of the two aesthetic categories, deriving beauty from pleasure and sublimity from pain. According to Burke, the pleasure of beauty has a relaxing effect on the fibers of the body, whereas sublimity, in contrast, tightens these fibers. Burke's use of this physiological theory of beauty and sublimity makes him the first English writer to offer a purely aesthetic explanation of these effects; that is, Burke was the first to explain beauty and sublimity purely in terms of the process of perception and its effect upon the perceiver."
I like the notion of the energy generated from two opposites bound together and will seriously consider this in my work.