Bathos literally means "sinking" and is the combination of the very high with the very low. The term was introduced by Alexander Pope in his Peri Bathos, 1727. Pope's work is a parody of Longinus' On the Sublime (Peri Hupsos), in that he imitates Longinus's style for the purpose of ridiculing contemporary poets. Pope offers a lengthy schematic of the ways in which authors might "sink" in poetry, but the method that is most remembered now is the art of combining very serious matters with very trivial ones. (For example, he mentions a line of verse where God sweeps the clouds from the sky as being ridiculous for making the Creator a housemaid.) When something sublime is mixed with something ridiculous, the effect is comic or "bathetic" (e.g. children performing Macbeth or a Garden Club passion play).
When artists consciously mix the very serious with the very trivial, the effect is the absurd and absurd humor. However, when an artist is unconscious of the juxtaposition (e.g. when a film maker means for a man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet to be frightening), the result is bathos.
A tolerant but detached enjoyment of the esthetic failure that is inherent in naive, unconscious and honest bathos is an element of the camp sensibility, as first analyzed by Susan Sontag, in an essay 'Notes on camp' that first appeared in Partisan Review, 1960 [1].
Arguably, kitsch is bathos in concrete arts.
