Elizabeth Carter was unusually learned and self-educated. She translated many languages, including Greek and Arabic, wrote poetry and essays. Carter was admired by female and male colleagues alike and a welcome guest at Bluestocking meetings. Her Ode To Melancholy owes much to the literary movement of sensibility, indulging in feeling, addressing, personifying and inviting it. On the Indulgence of Fancy mainly deals with the imagination, which is inspired with by a nostalgic view of the past.
William Collins worked along the same sensibilious lines when he wrote Ode to Fear, addressing and personifying a feeling, and Ode to the Poetical Character, which seeks the place of the imagination for poetic inspiration.
Edmund Burke, politician and philosopher, wrote A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, a text that became very influential for the Romantic Movement. It is concerned with a lot of terms central to Sensibility, such as the sublime and terror, and in itself a very sensibilious text, dwelling on feeling and emotion. But it moves beyond Sensibility because it does not promote paralysis and absorption by emotions, but seeks to explain how those feelings come about, taking a cool philosophical approach to the subject.
