Puilosopuical Poetry: Tue Contrasting Poetics of Sidney and Scaliger J

PUILOSOPUICAL POETRY: TUE CONTRASTING POETICS OF SIDNEY AND SCALIGER J. R. Brink The eclecticism of Sir Philip Sidney's De/ence 0/ Poetry is con vincingly demonstrated by the number of classical, Italian, and French sources to which his ideas have been traced.' That Sidney's own conflation and synthesis of these sources represents an in dependent and important argument has also received support in several recent discussions of his poetics. 2 A. C. Hamilton, for ex ample, has suggested that Julius Caesar Scaliger, generally conced ed to be one of Sidney's main sources, differs radically from Sidney in his classification and understanding of the kinds of poetry, but since Hamilton's primary interest is in Sidney, he does not explore the implications of this difference. 3 Following Aristotle, Sidney sees the essential ingredient of poetry as imitation, understood as feigned images or fiction; Scaliger, on the other hand, insists that verse or meter is the distinguishing characteristic of poetry. In contrast to Sidney, who gracefully sets out to defend poetry in a vernacular oration, Scaliger systematical ly explores the nature and practice of poetry in a Neo-Latin treatise. Scaliger's Poetices has never been fully translated, an in dication of the decline in his reputation. Of the two works, however, it is Scaliger's Poetices that seems most clearly applicable to certain kinds of philosophical and historical poems written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and it is Scaliger's definition of poetry as verse, rather than imitation, which influenc ed one of the most popular poetic handbooks of the late sixteenth century. Early Renaissance commentary on poetry begins with an attempt to justify its moral and social utility; both Scaliger and Sidney par ticipate in the traditional exercise of arguing that poetry can, as Scaliger puts it, lead "the habits of men's minds to right reason, so that through them man may ac hieve action which is called 45 46 EXPLORATIONS IN RENAISSANCE CULTURE beatitude.' '4 Sidney, likewise, says that "the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher' , and that poetry can make men love the good before they are aware, "as if they took a medicine of cherries. '" In a sense both writers are echoing Plutarch by claiming that poetry provides a sweet taste making palatable the more substantial nourishment of philosophy. The rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics, and its diffusion du ring the sixteenth century, shifted the grounds of controversy from the utility to the nature of poetry. The Aristotelian definition of poetry as mimesis (imitation) prompted consideration of what constitutes the matter of poetry and of its distinctive characteristics as opposed to those of philos6phy and history. Moreover, the difficulty of classifying and squaring with Aristotle rediscovered works such as Lucretius' De rerum natura or vernacular works such as Dante's Divinia commedia and Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata forced critics to consider precisely wh at Aristotle meant by imitation. Was Lucretius a poet or a philosopher? Was Lucan a poet or a historian? These dilemmas led Sperone Speroni, perhaps carried away by an enthusiasm for controversy, to decide that Virgil's Bucolics were most properly poetry since the Georgics were didactic and the Aeneid more like history than poetic imitation. 6 Using Aristotle's Poetics as a central core from which the sixteenth-century debates on aesthetics derive, we can identify three central issues which interrelate and overlap, but which illustrate the significant differences between Scaliger and Sidney. First, must poetry involve imitation, or could anything in verse, for example the scientific treatises of Empedocles and others, be defined as poetry?7 The second, and no less crucial, issue involved the historian as weIl as the natural or moral philosopher. According to Aristotle, the historian "speaks of wh at has happened, the poet of the kind of thing that can happen" (p. 33). This affected the philosopher concerned with information or objective truth as weIl as the historian. Third, even if subject matter were not used to dif ferentiate poetry from philosophy and history , there remained other problems in understanding imitation. Aristotle's bald state ment that "the poet himself should do as little of the talking as possible; for in those parts he is not being an imitator" (p. 65) was repeatedly lifted out of context. If the poet could not speak in his own voice, Empedocles and, more significantly, Lucretius must be excluded from the canon. Their poetry did not have the fiction or fable that might be used to redeem Virgil. In fact, interpreted literaIly, Aristotle's dictum might exclude Dante and even Petrarch and other lyric poets who speak in their own voices. .

Load more