This week marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of Edmund Burke's first book, which highlights the statesman's mastery of the English language, writes Sara Keating.

The bronze statue of Edmund Burke that flanks the front entrance of Trinity College Dublin is angled with its head tilted downwards. A scroll is rolled up in Burke's left hand and his mouth is half open. He is considering the crowds that pass him by, oblivious, and is getting ready to address them.

On the other side of the entrance, Oliver Goldsmith's face is lifted towards the sky. He holds a pen in his right hand, and its nib is pointed at an open book in his hands. He is contemplating the beauty of the clouds before he begins to write. These two men are the guardians of Trinity College - Burke, the statesman, and Goldsmith, the writer.

However, the opposition of politician and poet is somewhat disingenuous, because as much as Goldsmith's fictions reflected a profound social commitment, Burke's political speeches revealed a mastery of prose that was unparalleled at a time when words were a currency as valued as material wealth.

Tomorrow marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of Edmund Burke's first book, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Written in the years following his graduation from Trinity College, it reveals Burke's interest in the transformative power of language and art.

This preoccupation with aesthetics can be mapped through to his prolific political career, where he used his linguistic prowess to defend the British monarchy; to support American independence; to condemn the French Revolution; and to oppose the corruptions of British colonialism in India and Ireland.

A Philosophical Inquiry. . . is preoccupied with individual responses to beauty in art and nature. Art is beautiful, well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, Burke argues, but nature is sublime, and has the power to compel and destroy us as well as titillate our senses.

Beauty is inspired by love. It is rationale and order. It soothes our souls and proves God's providence. The sublime, on the other hand, is inspired by fear. It is chaos and infinity. It provokes terror, awe and physical pain and it bears out the miracle of creation.

An experience during his early years at Trinity might have inspired this interest in the power of nature, when the banks of the Liffey burst during a storm, flooding his family's house on Arran Quay. Writing to a friend, Burke describes the "melancholy gloom of the day . . . the hoarse rumblings of the swoln Liffey, with the flood which even where I write lays close siege to our whole street . . . "

Yet the beauty of conversing with his friend, he concludes in the letter, is enough to ease his fears. Burke's aesthetic treatise is wrought in a similarly apocalyptic prose, setting a standard for the romantic poets writing after the Enlightenment, who were also preoccupied with the insurmountable power of nature.

However, Burke's work resounds far beyond the "wild ecstasies" and "dizzy raptures" of Wordsworth, and has become a key starting point for contemporary Irish cultural critics interested in issues of political conservatism and post-colonialism, and even, some argue, post-modernism and multiculturalism.

Although Burke has long been vilified as the enemy of liberal left-wing politics (he has often been invoked as a guiding spirit against communism and political revolution), he has recently been reclaimed by Irish academics and cultural critics engaging with the conflicts between tradition and modernity that have informed the development of Irish literary, historical and political traditions.

Burke was certainly no radical, his defenders argue, but a careful reading of his work, set against his Irish background, suggests a man for whom the defence of tradition was as much about the survival of indigenous culture as the resistance to change.

Prof Luke Gibbons, who will give a closing speech tomorrow at a Royal Irish Academy conference celebrating the anniversary of the publication of Burke's treatise, is a notable defender of Burke, and he argues that the "aesthetic of shock, the aesthetic of terror" in Burke's first book suggests a more progressive motivation to Burke's later political ideas, one which is relevant to the increasing internationalisation of societies today.

Although A Philosophical Inquiry. . . was published before Burke's political career took off, Gibbons argues that it shows a "sensitivity to cultural tradition" in the face of "the shock of Empire, when the West was encountering [cultural] difference in a way unimaginable before".

In Burke's later defence of political, social or economic tradition, Gibbon sees a condemnation of the "cultural cleansing" that accompanied Britain's colonial enterprises.The controversies of political influence aside, there can be no dispute about Burke's mastery of the English language. Prof David Wilson, who teaches in the department of Celtic studies at the University of Toronto, states that the book "holds the key to the rhetorical style that gave [Burke's other work] much of its power".

"Clear expression," Wilson comments, "was not enough, in Burke's view. [What Burke called] 'strong expression' - the arrangement of words that appealed to the passions, that could 'touch us and move us' - had much more persuasive power."

The debate that followed the publication of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and has continued to haunt his reputation, "was not only about politics, but also about the way in which political ideas were communicated", Wilson says.

Burke's political pamphlets and the recorded speeches from his tenure in British parliament demonstrate this tension between rhetoric and political ideology. Westminster in the late 1700s was like a theatre of sorts, and Edmund Burke was the leading man.

Actor David Garrick, among other notable theatrical types, would join the queues outside parliament to hear Burke speak, in the pronounced Dublin accent that distinguished him among his peers. His friend and colleague William Hazlitt said that stenographers trying to furiously type down Burke's often improvised speeches were faced with a challenge somewhat like holding a bottle under Niagara Falls. And even in the face of political opposition, Burke was unanimously renowned as a persuasive speaker; as playwright Fanny Burney wrote, "the whirlwind of his eloquence nearly drew me into its vortex".

Gibbons also believes that "Burke brought the linguistic brilliance into the public sphere of everyday politics. It is amazing that someone, virtually thinking on their feet, could raise language to such a profound and lasting level, especially in an age where the sound bite reigned and language was disposable. "Burke said things for particular occasions that lasted for centuries. That he could match immediate practical intervention with long-term cultural resonance is remarkable," he says.

The clarity and balanced arguments noted in Burke's speech were no doubt developed during his years at Trinity, where he was a co-founder of Trinity's first debating society, the College Historical Society (known as The Hist).

In his earliest political pamphlets, however, balanced judgment was given precedence over his own, still developing, political ideology.

In fact, one of his earliest biographers, referring to a pamphlet published early in Burke's career condemning corruption in the Irish parliament, comments that Burke's argument was "so carefully and weightily judicious that Burke scholars have quite failed to agree whether he was supporting Lucas (the man charged with anti-Catholic prejudice) or contemptuous of him".

The blend of practical thought and persuasive, poetic, linguistic power in A Philosophical Inquiry . . . and Burke's other work is perhaps one of the most basic and least controversial defences that can be made for the significance of Burke's contribution to literary studies.

More radical cultural critics, however, still maintain that principles are more important than poetry, and that the man who called democracy "the most shameless thing in the world" is, in Karl Marx's equally persuasive words, "a sycophant and an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois".