A number of different theories about the nature of poetry and the poet coexisted in the Renaissance. In their formulation of these theories Renaissance poets and critics drew on certain key classical texts, but modified them in the light of their Christian beliefs. Aristotle’s Poetics (scarcely known in the Middle Ages) and Horace’s The Art of Poetry were the most important of these. A group of works on the nature of oratory, rhetoric, and on the role of the orator contributed directly to poetic theory: Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s Orator and On the Orator, and Quintilian’s Education of an Orator. Plato was generally influential as reinterpreted by the Neoplatonists, but three works dealing directly or indirectly with poetic theory, Ion, Phaedrus and Republic X, were read in their own right. The educational theory of poetry was influenced by a minor essay of Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry. There was a large body of Renaissance Italian criticism drawing on classical sources, but with important exceptions this went unread by English critics.
Unlike their modern counterparts, Renaissance critics were on the whole less concerned with the sources of poetry than with its function. In terms of its sources and its relation to reality, poetry was variously regarded as inspiration, madness, imaginative creation or imitation. In terms of its function, its effect on the individual or on society, it was regarded as a civilising force, an educational instrument, a means to action or a key to secret knowledge. The poet, depending on which view of poetry the critic was adopting, was a madman, priest, prophet, craftsman, teacher, orator or social critic. Poetry was often treated as part of what was considered a larger, more important, subject, usually theology, philosophy or rhetoric.
The Muses are the mythological embodiment of the ancient belief that the poet is inspired by a force outside himself to write of subjects beyond his normal reach. The daughters of Zeus and Memory, each of the nine Muses patronised a different art: Clio (history), Euterpe (music), Thalia (comedy), Melpomene (tragedy), Terpsichore (dancing), Erato (lyric poetry), Polyhymnia (song and rhetoric), Calliope (epic poetry), Urania (astronomy). Their leader was Apollo, and the mountains of Helicon and Parnassus were sacred to them. Homer, Hesiod (1) and Pindar speak of themselves as inspired by the Muses, and invocation of the Muses to help the poet became a traditional formula of epic and heroic poetry. Although in Renaissance poetry reference to the Muses is often simply elaboration of a convention, or a device whereby the poet personifies an aspect of himself (as in Sidney’s famous outburst in Astrophel and Stella i: ‘“Fool!” said my Muse to me, “Look in thy heart and write”’), it can also be a serious embodiment of the tension between classical and Christian images and vocabularies, heroic inspiration by the Muses sometimes fusing and sometimes contrasting with prophetic inspiration by angels or apostolic inspiration by the Holy Ghost. Milton appears to differentiate completely between the two traditions; in The Reason of Church Government he says the writing of a poem is not ‘to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters [i.e. the Muses], but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases’. (This identification of the Christian poet with the prophet Isaiah (6:6–7) is also made in the ‘Nativity Ode’.) Yet in Paradise Lost, while ostensibly maintaining this distinction, Milton in fact incorporates the classical tradition: he repudiates Calliope, the epic Muse, but the Spirit which supports and teaches him is Urania, the ‘heavenly Muse’, ‘the meaning, not the name’ (2). He distinguishes the idea of true Christian from false classical inspiration while retaining the classical form.
Closely allied to the idea of inspiration is that of poetic madness or frenzy (furor poeticus). The most elaborate classical statement of this idea is in Plato’s Ion 534. Plato clearly intends to belittle the irrational, capricious knowledge of the poet in comparison with the rational, earned knowledge of the philosopher, but Renaissance Neoplatonism transforms poetic madness into a term of approval. In this view the poet becomes a priest (Latin vates) with a sacred office; he is a mediator, a chosen instrument by means of which divine truth propagates itself; although he cannot exercise rational control over his own utterances, he has involuntary access to a truth above reason. The poet-priest’s divine knowledge is sometimes paradoxically associated with a significant physical disability: the seer is blind. In Paradise Lost III ll. 1–55 the blind Milton, invoking light, identifies himself with the blind poets and prophets of antiquity, Homer and Teiresias. A criticism of the idea of poetic inspiration may be contained in the episode in The Faerie Queene VI x in which Colin Clout’s vision of the dancing Graces is interrupted and broken by the knight Calidore, who tries to share in it. Spenser perhaps means that though the poet may apprehend an other-worldly perfection he can neither control it nor transmit it, hence he cannot mediate between the celestial and mundane worlds.
The idea that the poet is divinely inspired was widespread in the Renaissance. However, the poet’s divine nature was sometimes interpreted in a more daring way. Just as God, the creator of the world, is a maker, a poet, so the poet, the creator of his own world, is a god. The idea of God as a maker is both Platonic and Christian. In Plato’s Timaeus 29–30 the Demiurge makes the world as a copy of perfect Form. The analogy between the creator and the craftsman, and between the world and a work of art, is continued by Plotinus (Ennead V viii). Deriving from these and from similar biblical images (God is a potter in Isaiah 29:16) the idea of God as an artist becomes a Renaissance commonplace, usefully summed up by Browne in Religio Medici: ‘All things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.’ God is regarded as the author of two books, the Book of Works, or nature, and the Book of Words, or Scripture. Augustine compares God’s ordering of human history with the principle of poetic antithesis: ‘There is a beauty in the composition of the world’s history arising from the antithesis of contraries—a kind of eloquence in events, instead of in words’ (City of God XI xviii). Theology, according to Boccaccio in the Life of Dante xxii, is the poetry of God; and in Scripture God uses poetic devices. It is a logical though bold step to turn the analogy around. Theology is poetry, says Boccaccio, and poetry is theology; the poet is a theologian. The most interesting Renaissance accounts linking God and the poet through their common creative capacity are those of Sidney in An Apology for Poetry (3) and Tasso in Discourses on the Heroic Poem (4). The poet is like God because he creates a second nature which is not based on existing nature but which is made out of nothing, out of his own imagination (5). His world is like God’s world because it is controlled by the same principle of discordant concord (concordia discors), or unity through variety (4; Ch. 6.9,10). The design of a work of art is like the design of the universe not because the poet imitates God’s design but because he creates on the same principles as God (see Chapter 13).
This Renaissance idea of the poet as creator represents a radical departure from the various traditional definitions of the poet as imitator of nature. The most important theory of poetry as imitation or mimesis is expounded in Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle rebuts the theory of imitation put forward by Plato in Republic X 595–602, that a work of art is at two removes from reality because the artist imitates a natural object which is itself an imitation of ideal Form. For Aristotle, on the contrary, imitation is not the copying of the particulars of the natural world but the revelation of its essence. Poetry is concerned not with the factual but the probable; thus ‘poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history; for while poetry is concerned with universal truths, history treats of particular facts’ (Poetics IX, translated by T.S.Dorsch). Important though this theory is, it does not appear to have been properly understood in Renaissance England. Some of the assumptions of the theory of imitation were accepted: the idea that the poet imitates a known, external reality was far more orthodox than the idea that he creates a new reality. The term ‘imitation’ is frequently to be found in Renaissance theorists, but in a different sense from Aristotle’s. It means the imitation not of nature but of literary forms, genres and other poets. Imitation in this sense is an important humanist concept, and it implies a view of the poet not as inspired priest but as responsible craftsman (see Chapter 9).
Theories about the sources of poetry—divine inspiration, creation from the poet’s imagination, imitation of nature—were much less debated than theories about its effects. These theories were largely moralistic, but a number of approaches can be distinguished. In The Art of Poetry Horace gives a brief sketch of the history of poetry; poets were the ancient law-givers and educators, the founders of civilisation. As examples he mentions the myths of Orpheus, who tamed wild men and beasts with his music, and Amphion, who charmed the stones of Thebes to build themselves (8). In the Renaissance Orpheus and Amphion became standard symbols of the artist’s ability to impose harmony on chaos, to bring about through the means of aesthetic enchantment some socially beneficial end. Yet the myth of Orpheus (which seems particularly to have fascinated Milton), though it contains the theory of the civilising power of poetry, also suggests the precariousness of civilisation, and perhaps the destructive capacities of inspiration. Ovid tells the story in Metamorphoses XI ll. 1–55. Orpheus, the gentle singer and tamer of beasts and men and even inanimate objects, was torn apart by Maenads, themselves inspired female followers of Dionysus, who was incensed at Orpheus’ refusal to worship him. His mother Calliope, the epic Muse, could do nothing to save him, as Milton laments in Lycidas ll. 58–63 and Paradise Lost VI ll. 31–9 (2).
The myth of Orpheus is a complex and suggestive account of the social effects of poetry and the relation between the poet and society. But the Renaissance critic’s account of these effects is often much cruder. Horace’s view that the best poet both pleases and teaches (Art of Poetry 1.343) contains the germ of the widely held Renaissance idea (also derived from Lucretius) that the function of poetry is essentially didactic, that it is a way of introducing philosophical ideas, disguised with the pleasures of metre, rhyme and fable, to intellects too feeble to digest philosophy unadorned (10). Poetry is a sugared pill, or, in Lucretius’ image, honey on the rim of a cup of medicine (7). In How the Young Man Should Study Poetry Plutarch regards the reading of poetry as a stepping-stone to the serious adult study of philosophy. This idea is taken up in the Renaissance, for example, by Harington in his preface to Orlando Furioso: poetry is an introduction for untutored minds to the more important subject of theology (9).
This belittling and patronising theory of poetry as a sugared pill is by no means the only didactic theory held in the Renaissance; it can be found coexisting with or incorporated into theories that in some respects contradict it. Two other didactic theories illustrate this process: the humanist theory of poetry as rhetoric, and the allegorical theory of poetry. In the simplest didactic theory poetry is a means of conveying moral knowledge. In the humanist view poetry does not simply teach; it moves men to action, it makes them better, it causes them to imitate the moral ideal embodied in the poem. Humanist theory regards poetry as having an important political function. Thus whereas the sugared pill theory is concerned with the intellectually feeble reader, the fool, as Harington describes him, humanist theory is concerned with the socially and politically conspicuous reader. Both are to be transformed through poetry; the fool will become wise, the conspicuous man will become a moral example. Though the humanist theory is based on classical rhetorical theory it represents an important Renaissance innovation. (For further discussion see Chapter 9.)
The allegorical theory of poetry, which persisted from antiquity through the Middle Ages, but which was given prominence by Renaissance Neoplatonists, assumes three different classes of reader. The first, the most superficial, reads only the fable and does not penetrate beyond it. The second (the swallower of the sugared pill) learns from the fable simple moral truths. The third, most important reader penetrates the veil of fable to acquire secret philosophical or religious knowledge which cannot be expressed otherwise than through fable. For the second class of reader poetry is less serious than philosophy, for the third class it is more serious. (For further discussion see Chapter 12.)
The most interesting English Renaissance critics of poetry were themselves poets who repeatedly tested their own ideas in their poems, Sidney, Spenser, Jonson and Milton being the chief examples. Much interesting speculation about the nature and ends of poetry can be found not in prose treatises but in the poems themselves: in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, for example, or Herbert’s The Temple. But modern readers applying Renaissance theory to Renaissance poems should be cautious. A good deal of lyric poetry simply slips through the net of social and moral theory, yet almost no Renaissance critic (the Italian Castelvetro is an exception) was prepared to allow that the chief function of poetry might be to give delight.
1 The Muses once taught Hesiod to sing
Sweet songs, while he was shepherding his lambs
On holy Helicon; the goddesses
Olympian, daughters of Zeus who holds
The aegis, first addressed these words to me:
‘You rustic shepherds, shame: bellies you are,
Not men! We know enough to make up lies
Which are convincing, but we also have
The skill, when we’ve a mind, to speak the truth.’
So spoke the fresh-voiced daughters of great Zeus
And plucked and gave a staff to me, a shoot
Of blooming laurel, wonderful to see.
And breathed a sacred voice into my mouth
With which to celebrate the things to come
And things which were before. They ordered me
To sing the race of blessed ones who live
Forever, and to hymn the Muses first
And at the end.
Hesiod Theogony ll. 22–34
2 Descend from heaven Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine
Following, above the Olympian hill I soar,
Above the flight of Pegasean wing.
The meaning, not the name I call: for thou
Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top
Of old Olympus dwell’st, but heavenly born,
Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,
Thou with eternal wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play
In presence of the almighty Father, pleased
With thy celestial song.
……Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.
But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard [i.e. Orpheus]
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned
Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou, who thee implores:
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.
Milton Paradise Lost VII ll. 1–12, 30–9
3 Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the heroes, demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.
Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden…
Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of Nature; but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to his own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam: since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it.
Sidney An Apology for Poetry
4 Just as in this marvellous domain of God called the world we behold the sky scattered over and adorned with such variety of stars, and as we descend from realm to realm, we marvel at the air and the sea full of birds and fish, and the earth host to so many animals wild and tame, with brooks, springs, lakes, meadows, fields, forests, and mountains, here fruits and flowers, there glaciers and snow, here dwellings and ploughed fields, there desert and wilderness; yet for all this, the world that contains in its womb so many diverse things is one, its form and essence one, and one the bond that links its many parts and ties them together in discordant concord, and nothing is missing, yet nothing is there that does not serve for necessity or ornament; just so, I judge, the great poet (who is called divine for no other reason than that as he resembles the supreme Artificer in his workings he comes to participate in his divinity) can form a poem in which, as in a little world, one may read here of armies assembling, here of battles on land or sea, here of conquests of cities, skirmishes and duels, here of jousts, here descriptions of hunger and thirst, here tempests, fires, prodigies, there of celestial and infernal councils, there seditions, there discord, wanderings, adventures, enchantments, deeds of cruelty, daring, courtesy, generosity, there the fortunes of love, now happy, now sad, now joyous, now pitiful. Yet the poem that contains so great a variety of matters none the less should be one, one in form and soul; and all these things should be so combined that each concerns the other, corresponds to the other, and so depends on the other necessarily or verisimilarly that removing any one part or changing its place would destroy the whole. And if that is true, the art of composing a poem resembles the plan of the universe, which is composed of contraries, as that of music is.
Tasso Discourses on the Heroic Poem III
5 A poet is as much to say as a maker. And our English name well conforms with the Greek word, for of πoiεîυ [poiein], to make, they call a maker poeta. Such as (by way of resemblance and reverently) we may say of God; who without any travail to his divine imagination made all the world of nought, nor also by any pattern or mould, as the Platonics with their Ideas do fantastically suppose. Even so the very poet makes and contrives out of his own brain both the verse and matter of his poem, and not by any foreign copy or example… It is therefore of poets thus to be conceived, that if they be able to devise and make all these things of themselves, without any subject of verity, that they be (by manner of speech) as creating gods.
Puttenham The Art of English Poesy I i
6 The use of this feigned history [i.e. poetry] hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical. Because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed providence. Because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations. So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.
Bacon The Advancement of Learning II iv
7 My art is not without a purpose. Physicians, when they wish to treat children with a nasty dose of wormwood, first smear the rim of the cup with a sweet coat of yellow honey. The children, too young as yet for foresight, are lured by the sweetness at their lips into swallowing the bitter draught. So they are tricked but not trapped, for the treatment restores them to health. In the same way our doctrine often seems unpalatable to those who have not sampled it, and the multitude shrink from it. That is why I have tried to administer it to you in the dulcet strains of poesy, coated with the sweet honey of the Muses. My object has been to engage your mind with my verses while you gain insight into the nature of the universe and the pattern of its architecture.
Lucretius The Nature of the Universe I ll. 935–50
8 While men still roamed the woods, Orpheus, the holy prophet of the gods, made them shrink from bloodshed and brutal living; hence the fable that he tamed tigers and ravening lions; hence too the fable that Amphion, builder of Thebes’s citadel, moved stones by the sound of his lyre, and led them whither he would by his supplicating spell. In days of yore, this was wisdom, to draw a line between public and private rights, between things sacred and things common, to check vagrant union, to give rules for wedded life, to build towns, and grave laws on tables of wood; and so honour and fame fell to bards and their songs, as divine.
Horace The Art of Poetry ll. 391–401
9 Tasso in his excellent work of Jerusalem Liberata likeneth poetry to the physic that men give unto little children when they are sick…speaking to God with a pretty prosopopeia [personification],
Thou knowst, the wanton worldlings ever run
To sweet Parnassus’ fruits, how otherwhile
The truth well sauced with pleasant verse hath won
Most squeamish stomachs with the sugared style:
So the sick child that potions all doth shun
With comfits and with sugar we beguile,
And cause him take a wholesome sour receipt:
He drinks, and saves his life with such deceit.
This is then that honest fraud in which (as Plutarch saith) he that is deceived is wiser than he that is not deceived, and he that doth deceive is honester than he that doth not deceive.
Harington Preface to Orlando Furioso
10 I say the philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught. But the poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs, the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher… He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness; but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well enchanting skill of music; and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner. And, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue: even as the child is often brought to take more wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste: which, if one should begin to tell them the nature of aloes or rhubarb they should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at their mouth.
Sidney An Apology for Poetry