Burke's influential early writings on aesthetic are intimately connected to his political concerns according to this study of his engagement with Irish politics and culture. The heart of his aesthetic addressed itself to the experience of terror, a spectre that haunts Burke's political imagination throughout his career. Burke's preoccupation with violence, sympathy and pain actually allowed him to explore the dark side of the Enlightenment. This major reassessment of a key political and cultural figure appeals to Irish studies specialists, political theorists and Romanticists.