Copyright by Zachary Daniel Sharp 2020
The Dissertation Committee for Zachary Daniel Sharp Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation:
Rhetoric, Poetics, and the Devotional Lyric in Early Modern England
Committee:
Davida H. Charney, Supervisor
Wayne A. Rebhorn, Co-Supervisor
Lawrence D. Green
Mark G. Longaker
Jeffrey Walker
Rhetoric, Poetics, and the Devotional Lyric in Early Modern England
by
Zachary Daniel Sharp
Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin August 2020 Dedication
For my parents
Acknowledgements
In the course of planning and writing this dissertation I have incurred many debts.
I thank Frank Whigham for starting me on the path and Wayne Rebhorn for his help along the way. I am also grateful for the privilege of having taken Jeffrey Walker’s course on classical rhetoric (twice) as well as for his encouragement when this project was still in its nascent stages. If it is not immediately obvious, my greatest scholarly debt is to him.
I want to thank my friends and colleagues at The University of Texas at Austin, in particular James Garner and Xinyao Xiao, for suggesting improvements to early drafts of these chapters. I have also benefited substantially from the support of the English and
Rhetoric departments.
I owe much to my teachers and mentors at Trinity University, San Antonio, where
I did my undergraduate work: I wish to acknowledge Michael Schreyach, Jeffrey Rufo, and my first teacher of rhetoric, Willis Salomon.
Lastly, for her patience, enthusiasm, and dedication, I thank Davida Charney, who, as John Donne would say, taught me to “speake truths, and credibly.”
v Abstract
Rhetoric, Poetics, and the Devotional Lyric in Early Modern England
Zachary Daniel Sharp, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2020
Supervisor: Davida H. Charney Co-Supervisor: Wayne A. Rebhorn
Recently, scholars have argued that poetry provided the foundations for the development of rhetoric in antiquity. Lyric poetry in particular functioned as epideictic performance, a public, generalized art able to encompass a range of rhetorical motives. I propose that poetry played a similar role in early modern England, especially in the development of the devotional lyric. This contrasts with the prevailing view, that poetry served a primarily didactic role in the humanistic classroom and, more broadly, acted as a propaedeutic to ethical and philosophical instruction. I argue that these different uses of poetry represent two coevolving traditions centered on two competing ideas about the goal of poetry: “performative” poetics sees poetry as a situationally-defined, rhetorical art of invention; “paideutic” poetics sees poetry as a hermeneutic art that trains ethical and philosophical judgment. I examine how these traditions manifest themselves in
Renaissance poetics, particularly in George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy and in
William Scott’s Model of Poesy. The former imagines poetry to be a performative, courtly
vi art, where rhetoric and poetry are fundamentally alike; the latter sees poetry as a theoretical art of moral instruction defined by an Aristotelian criterion of mimesis. I argue that these traditions also influence the religious lyrics of George Herbert and John Donne. Herbert and Donne, I suggest, innovate within these two very different paradigms: Herbert treats his lyrics as public, liturgical performances, while Donne sees his as “literary critical” artifacts meant to exercise practical judgment and train aristocratic taste.
vii Table of Contents
Chapter One: The Epideictic Genres of Lyric: Performative and Paideutic Poetics ...... 1
Introduction ...... 1
Ancient Theories of Artistic Discourse ...... 11
Grammarians and Critics ...... 19
The Lyric as Ritual Discourse ...... 31
Lyric Genres and Epideictic Performativity ...... 45
Overview of This Dissertation ...... 51
Chapter Two: “Fitter to Please the Court Than the School”: Performative and Paideutic Rhetoric in Elizabethan Poetics ...... 56
Introduction ...... 56
Thomas Elyot on Rhetoricians and Versifiers ...... 62
Sidney’s Defence of Poetry ...... 67
Paideutic Poetics: Scott’s Model of Poesy ...... 71
Performative Poetics: Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy ...... 77
Conclusion ...... 86
Chapter Three: “Devotion, Not Controversie”: George Herbert’s Temple and Lyric Performativity ...... 91
Introduction ...... 91
The Temple as Liturgy ...... 101
Performativity in The Country Parson ...... 111
Epideictic Performativity in The Temple ...... 119
“Church-Musick”: The Temple and Public Devotion after the Restoration ...... 133
Conclusion ...... 137 viii Chapter Four: John Donne Is Not a Sophist: Paideutic Poetics and Useful Obscurity in the Holy Sonnets ...... 141
Introduction ...... 141
“That Mystical Writing of Verse”: Donne and Mysterious Discourse ...... 148
Analytical Rhetoric in the Holy Sonnets ...... 159
Psalmic Interpretation, Coterie Exchange, and Literary Judgment ...... 168
Conclusion ...... 179
Conclusion ...... 182
Bibliography ...... 187
ix Chapter One: The Epideictic Genres of Lyric: Performative and Paideutic Poetics
INTRODUCTION Roland Greene offers a timely and valuable insight about Renaissance poetics when he observes that “the disparity between the available terms of lyric theory and the actual productions of the genre” in the Renaissance “become arrestingly evident.”1 The
Renaissance lyric, according to Greene, is difficult to categorize because in it we find the beginnings of the “modern idea of lyric productions as short, intense, and exquisite redactions of impassioned speech,” an idea of lyric that is only first developed critically in the Romantic period. Renaissance lyric theory, then, becomes a kind of contradiction in terms. As Greene puts it, “where it is assumed that speech can be idealized into poetry and poetry naturalized into speech, a poetics of lyric like those of epic and drama can seem beside the point.” Furthermore, since lyric is a multiform genre—comprised of odes, hymns, and many other generic types—it seems to lack the cohesiveness of other major poetic categories, leading to its theoretical neglect.2
Greene also points out that the lyric’s close proximity to rhetoric results in difficulties categorizing it poetically. This is a crucial observation, as is Greene’s point that there were certain aspects of Renaissance poetics—a focus on narrative and other mimetic genres of poetry—that led to theorists giving lyric comparatively little attention. But
Greene falls back on a relatively common, and, I want to claim, mistaken critical tendency.
1 Roland Greene, “The Lyric,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 216. 2 Greene, 216. 1 Like many modern critics, he sees the history of poetics as a steady and welcome progression away from rhetoric and toward a greater degree of poetic autonomy. The
Renaissance “conflation” of poetry with rhetoric is thus seen to have delayed a fully realized theory of the lyric. For Greene, it is the “lyric subjectivity” of the Renaissance sonnet sequence that comes closest to something more appropriately poetic: the lyric sequence becomes “an occasion for reflection on subjecthood,” and, more importantly, it evokes the “plurivocal,” discursive world of narrative and drama. The sonnet sequence, now better able to conform to mimetic poetic criteria, is for Greene the lyric’s most theoretically stable form.3
Recent scholarship in both rhetoric and literary studies has called into question the need to account for lyric using such strictly poetic criteria.4 Jonathan Culler, for example, in his Theory of Lyric, contends that literary pedagogy in the West, derived in part from the humanist inheritance of classical hermeneutics, denies lyric’s rhetoricity in favor of an interpretive model that demands that students find “hidden” or “deep” meanings uttered by a fictional speaker. The consequence for modern poetics is, to use John Stuart Mill’s famous phrase, that we think of rhetoric as “heard” and poetry as “overheard.” According
3 Greene, 228. Another equally ingenious insight about this “standard picture” of rhetoric and poetics comes from James Biester, who finds in the Renaissance’s conservative interpretation of classical poetics a novel way of classifying lyric. According to Biester, “[f]or poets and theorists to have devised a new function of poetry that had no resemblance to its functions as classically defined was simply inconceivable,” and lyric poets consequently saw the telos of poetry in the traditional rhetorical terms of moving, teaching, and delighting. To achieve this end, Biester argues, lyric poets “stole what they needed from treatments of epic and, especially, tragedy”—in particular Aristotle’s discussion, in Poetics 21-22, of tragic plots and tropes acting similarly in their ability to overpower an audience emotionally. See Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 13–14, 18, 26–28. 4 See, for example, the special issue of PMLA devoted to problems of genre as it relates to the “new lyric studies” (PMLA 123, no. 1 [2008]). 2 to Culler, seeing lyric as mimetic fiction risks overlooking rhetorical features central to a full critical appraisal of it. An “alternative model,” he asserts, can be found in “classical conceptions of encomiastic or epideictic discourse,” where lyric poetry is considered a mode of rhetorical performance that is “nonmimetic, nonfictional,” and—most importantly—a “distinctive linguistic event.”5
Literary scholars, in short, are recognizing the need to rethink the lyric. In doing so, they have turned to a rich body of work by scholars of rhetoric who, as part of a larger reconceptualization of epideictic, have already rethought the relationship between rhetoric and poetics. Jeffrey Walker and Bruno Gentili, in particular, have argued that ancient rhetoric is both derived from and enlivened by traditions of public poetic performance.
Culler echoes Walker’s argument that poetry’s performative features have been obscured since antiquity by the Romantic idea that poetry is fundamentally private, introspective, and expressive, rather than a persuasive art. The “conflation” of rhetoric and poetry in the
Renaissance, then, seems due in large part to our modern, post-Romantic concerns about the autonomy of poetry, where rhetoric is seen to infiltrate a unique artistic heterocosm.
M. H. Abrams has shown that poetic theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries avoided the rhetorical categorization of poetry by taking up Aristotle’s idea of intrinsic teleology, which they applied to poetry in a novel way. The fundamental break with ancient tradition came when these critics began to see poetry not as manufactured according to technical rules but “grown” out of the mind of the “natural genius.” The
5 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 7. 3 Romantic period’s “tendency to view a work of art, in its becoming and being, as endowed with organic properties” develops into an “organismic” theory of art, comprised of the
“topics of ‘natural genius,’ of inspired composition, and of the literary ‘grace,’ or spontaneous stroke of invention totally beyond the reach of deliberate intention, method, or rule.”6
This view of poetry is derived in part from what Walker calls Aristotle’s mistaken
“double vision.” Aristotle recognized that poetry shares many features in common with rhetoric. However, the task of poetics, as Aristotle saw it, was to find out uniquely “poetic” principles at work in poetry.7 We can see an “Aristotelian” Romanticism at work in Percy
Bysshe Shelly, for instance, who claims that the “poet and the man are two different natures; though they exist together they may be unconscious of each other, and incapable of deciding upon each other’s powers and efforts by any reflex act.”8 Poetry becomes autonomous in execution, divorced even from the poet, and the poet, rather than a crafter of verse, is thought of instead as a hierophant interpreting mysterious psychical processes.
Poetry is simply the method of expression, a way to literally “press out” preexistent, revelatory truths about the self and its connection to nature at large, truths which have no immediate connection with the world of opinion.9
While Renaissance poetics did concern itself with Neoplatonic ideas about the
6 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 186. 7 Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 293. 8Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (London: Gordion Press, 1926), 10:287. Quoted in Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 193. 9 See Abrams’s brief overview of the “expressive theory” of poetry, in Mirror and the Lamp, 21–26. 4 poetic vates, or revealer of hidden truths, which led to idealized notions about the poeta theologus and the poeta philosophicus, it was influenced most by the Latin rhetorical tradition, which saw poetry primarily as a propaedeutic to other arts.10 Humanists considered poetry to be both similar to rhetoric and preliminary to the ethical and political training of the intelligentsia and ruling classes.11 In a sense, the humanist idea of poetry could be described as “principled rhetoric,” to use Christopher Ricks’s term.12 Poetry indeed communicates wisdom, in that it involves the psychology of readers—their ethical, imaginative, and intellective faculties—and such wisdom is derived from and is applied to poetry in pedagogical settings.
This notion of poetry, as an art of eloquence and an art preliminary to rhetoric, came to be eclipsed by Romantic poetics. Harold Bloom, for example, can claim that poetry from
Pindar to the Romantic period amounts to insider-discourse, where poets converse principally with each other, “a dialectic between art and art.”13 “There are no texts, only relationships between texts,” Bloom argues. Poets “misread” their progenitors in a creative act of “misprision.”14 This indeed describes a kind of hermeneutic and imitative process preliminary to composition, but it is a process reconceptualized in terms of Romantic
10 Concetta Carestia Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 1250-1500 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1981), 26–27. 11 For an account of “pragmatic humanism,” see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). 12 Christopher Ricks, “Literary Principles as against Theory,” in Essays in Appreciation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 312. 13 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 99. 14 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3–4. 5 esoterism and aestheticism.
The act of poetic creation is with Bloom as it is with Shelley an unconscious act, one that happens according to a hidden principle of agency, here a defensive mechanism
(or “reflex act,” as Shelley would put it) intrinsic to the poet’s psychology—a sense of
“anxiety” or “melancholy” that arises from the aesthetic admiration of one’s poetic precursors. Young poets creatively and antagonistically “revise” their poems in a game of literary one-upmanship.15
Romanticism, in short, is just one example of how poetry is complicated by its earlier transition from an oral to a hermeneutic art. Yet Romanticism’s impact on the critical tradition yields a gradually developing emphasis on “pure” poetry above poetry that serves a rhetorical function. The consequence is that poetry becomes divorced from its role as an art that can teach and display eloquence.
For a corrective to this critical tendency, we may turn to Walker’s thesis, that in the epideictic and semi-deliberative forums of antiquity, poetry simply was oratory. He argues that examining the ancient origins of lyric reveals the inability of the modern “expressive theory” to account for the full range of rhetorical motives that once existed in lyric. A theory of lyric where “feeling’s the thing” means emphasizing that lyric may only “seem to operate discursively,” when in fact lyric has been a discursive art for most of its history.16
Walker finds in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ first-century BC text, On Literary
15 See especially the chapter “Kenosis or Repetition and Discontinuity,” in Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 77–92. 16 Walker, “The View from Halicarnassus: Aristotelianism and the Rhetoric of Epideictic Song,” in New Definitions of the Lyric: Theory, Technology and Culture, ed. Mark Jeffreys (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1998), 20. 6 Composition, evidence of an ongoing interpenetration of poetry and oratory in antiquity.
Dionysius compares the two arts in the following passage:
Now that my discussion of these matters [Dionysius’ outline of the different styles of composition] is at an end, you are eager to hear next how language without meter is made to resemble a beautiful poem or lyric, and how a poem or song is made similar to beautiful prose. I shall begin with the language of prose, selecting an author who has, I think, most clearly modeled his diction on that of poetry. . . . Now surely no one would deny that the speeches of Demosthenes are like the finest poems and lyrics, particularly his political speeches against Philip and his forensic speeches in public suits.17
Walker points out that the word translated here as “finest,” kratistos, “more literally means strongest, mightiest, or best and links poetic quality with persuasive power.” Indeed, “[f]or
Dionysius . . . the best and most powerful lyric poems come the nearest of all poetry to the condition of artfully composed orations,” and the “best and most artfully composed orations,” through the force of their stylistic virtuosity, “approach the condition of the best lyric poems.” For Walker, this means that “lyric poems are in essence orations in verse, and ‘good’ orations, those that are artfully constructed, are virtual lyric poems in prose.”18
This situation in antiquity is also evidence of a more expansive category of epideictic, which includes more than just speeches of praise and blame. Epideictic existed as a broad category of formal discourse in a loosely defined discursive field, ranging from sung discourse to formal prose. Walker summarizes as follows:
[T]he pragmatic and epideictic discourse genres of oral/archaic cultures fall into a sort of spectrum, with the casual business talk of everyday life at one extreme, and the highly formalized song and chant of religious ritual at the other. Between these extremes, we find a heterogeneous collection of epideictic and formalized
17 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Critical Essays, trans. Stephen Usher (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 2:209. 18 Walker, “View from Halicarnassus,” 17–18. 7 pragmatic genres, ranging from song and intoned or spoken “recitative” to oratorical declamation and plain speech—but a plain speech, if it is skilled, that will be punctuated and pervaded by sententious flights of wisdom-invoking eloquence, and often a general sense of rhythmic composition as well, derived from epideictic registers. Speakers and singers learn their eloquence and wisdom, and audiences learn what counts as eloquence and wisdom, from the models embodied and preserved in epideictic discourse. This is the characteristic pattern of oral or “traditional” societies worldwide, and of the archaic Greek world of the eighth century BC that Hesiod describes.19
What comes to be called epideictic encompasses both the categories of “rhetoric” and
“poetics” by virtue of its role as discourse that communicates wisdom in eloquent performance. Furthermore, in archaic Greece and in other oral cultures, speakers learn what eloquent speech is by performing it and seeing it performed.
To use Walker’s example, Pindar’s victory odes have been called by Bloom the
“truest paradigm” of lyric. However, when the “charm of Pindar’s prosody” or “his now lost music and choreography for choral performances” are stripped away, what we are left with is “recognizably, or ‘just,’ a piece of epideictic oratory, one that anticipates the later prose tradition of such rhetor-sophists as Gorgias and Isocrates.” In short, Pindar’s poetry is “part of a public, civic ritual and as such is an instance of public, civic discourse.”20 Yet
Pindar’s poetry is also what classicists cite as evidence of a kind of atavistic, unpoetic literature that was “corrected” by Aristotle’s Poetics.21
Moreover, since Aristotle, the civic-directedness of lyric has been eclipsed by an emphasis on argumentative prose on the one hand and narrative or dramatic poetry on the
19 Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, 14. 20 Walker, “View from Halicarnassus,” 23. 21 Walker, 23. 8 other. As Mark Johnson notes, many early lyrics likely did not survive simply because their situatedness in civic forums made them alien to readers removed from these contexts.
Though lyrics like a victory ode deal with such things as the gods and traditional lore, they are also concerned with specific occasions, as Johnson points out:
Even the surviving memorials to that poetry, having been increasingly replaced by epic, drama, oratory, and popular philosophy in the schools, became the private preserve of literary scholars [grammatikoi] and of connoisseurs of poetry; and because of their difficulties and what seemed their obscurities, the old lyrics were misunderstood, ignored, and finally all but abandoned by the common reader, who is, after all, the final arbiter of what literature lives and does not live.22
Lyric was “unsuited to the major categories of ancient literary theory” because it occupied a middle ground, neither literary nor rhetorical.23
However, in actual practice the lyric can—and indeed often does—retain many of its capabilities as a rhetorical art. It is clear that poetry flourished alongside rhetoric, particularly in its role as a starting point for later rhetorical training. What has not been addressed, though, is how the lyric may serve a civic role in later periods where the dominant “forum” for poetry was the schoolroom. In what follows, I will explain how a performance-based, rhetorical poetics—what I am calling “performative” poetics—was gradually eclipsed by an emphasis on prose argument and, in the Renaissance, by a model of poetics that was derived from poetry’s use in the humanistic classroom. I am calling this pedagogically focused poetics “paideutic,” insofar as it teaches poetry as part of the training of the Renaissance citizen, which roughly corresponds to the educational goals of
22 W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 76. 23 Johnson, 77. 9 ancient paideia.
Granted, the distinction between paideutic and performative poetry in the
Renaissance is not an easy one to make.24 Whether we think of poetry as a paideutic or performative art largely depends on whether (and in what ways) we understand poetry to be a tool of instruction as well as the extent to which its audience exists inside or outside of academic or educational contexts. To complicate matters further, the dominance of humanist pedagogy in the Renaissance meant that classical poetry in the schoolroom coexisted with rich vernacular traditions, and that humanism conditioned both the writing and reception of popular poetic genres, as Andrew Wallace has shown.25 Poetry could thus be justified and understood in humanist pedagogical terms, while at the same time vernacular practices of poetic composition, performance, and reception might differ considerably from those found in classrooms.
Paideutic poetics is inherently stable, deriving its robustness from poetry’s use as an educational tool. This fact contrasts markedly with the vernacular traditions of performance that are, by their variable nature, much more transitory. Moreover, as
Concetta Carestia Greenfield observes, “[p]ower is always founded on the structure of the curriculum within the educational institutions, where the new generations are molded in one direction or another.”26 And it is the way in which poetry serves the state in shaping
24 See, for instance, Kathy Eden’s account of the Renaissance reception of hermeneutics as a “rhetoric for the reader,” in Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 79–89. 25 Andrew Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 178–227. 26 Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 21. 10 the minds of the young that invariably gets emphasized when poetry is defended against its detractors. The downside is that the ability of poetry to communicate “culturally authoritative paradigms of eloquence and wisdom”27 in performative settings becomes overshadowed by the flourishing of poetry as a paideutic art.
While the public performance of eloquent speech, sung or recited, is predominant in “traditional” or predominantly oral cultures, it continues to be a factor—albeit a limited one—after the rise of literacy and institutionalized literary study. We may therefore derive a more robust description of the range of poetic practices in the Renaissance, I maintain, only after we consider how the lyric constitutes a rhetorical, performative art.
ANCIENT THEORIES OF ARTISTIC DISCOURSE The Greek word for “art,” techne, refers to productive rather than theoretical or speculative knowledge. It roughly corresponds to how we use the term “craft,” which can range from skilled manual labor to an activity requiring a complex set of skills, such as
“statecraft.”28 Aristotle sees techne as a repeatable, and therefore teachable, procedure leading to an action (ergon) that is not the result of an inevitable course of natural events.29
Medieval and Renaissance poetic and rhetorical theory use “art” (ars/arte) in this sense.
27 Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, 16. 28 For a discussion of how techne related to episteme in Ancient Greece, see S. Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7–40; Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 85–91. I am indebted to Douglas Biow’s discussion of techne in On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 21–92. The example of statecraft is his. 29 Aristotle, Metaphysics 981a-b; Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 2. 11 Rhetorical techne falls into two categories in antiquity, technical and sophistic rhetoric.
Technical rhetoric is taught via handbooks, the technai, which are meant to provide students and practitioners of rhetoric with rules, advice, and common topics and lines of inquiry (the topoi). Sophistic rhetoric predates the technai, and describes the practice of rhetors transmitting oratorical skill directly to pupils through performance (epideixis).30
This is not a neat distinction, and later sophistic teaching was almost certainly a combination of both demonstrative epideixis and written precept.31
Aristotle disparages both the technai and sophistic teaching. The handbooks, he argues, are too limited in scope, and they ignore how persuasion actually works, focusing instead on an overly simplistic means of arguing in judicial forums.32 Sophists likewise do not really teach rules for speaking—Aristotle compares teaching through demonstration and memorization to a shoemaker who tries to “teach his art by presenting his apprentice with an assortment of shoes.”33
Aristotle’s assessment is overly severe. Handbooks were written for a populace who needed easy access to winning strategies for pleading their cases in Greek courts of law. Sophists (namely, Gorgias and Protagoras) were itinerant teachers, allegedly the first to see rhetoric as a teachable art, and appear to have espoused an early form of skeptical, relativist epistemology that emphasized the difference between physis (nature or objective
30 George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 13–14. 31 Walker posits a lost techne by Isocrates, for example, in The Genuine Teachers of This Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012). 32 Aristotle, Rhetoric 1354a-1355b10. 33 Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations 183b36. 12 truth) and nomos (law, or normative convention).34 There is evidence that certain early sophistic precepts found their way into handbooks as well.35 Sophists, as their name suggests, sought to teach virtue and wisdom and, more importantly, seem to have held that virtue and wisdom were teachable—a position Plato argued against.36
Sophists are commonly associated with epideictic rhetoric, the type with which poetry is most often associated. Because of epideictic’s seeming impracticality, and perhaps because it so readily absorbs literary modes, many scholars consider it a “catch- all” category or generic “afterthought”—a category “meant to cover those orations that are unable to fit neatly into one of the two major classifications” of deliberative and forensic rhetoric.37 That scholars still “betray a certain unease with epideictic as a category” is borne out in recent scholarship.38 Epideictic is associated with ostentation, mere “show,” and it deals with issues where nothing seems particularly exigent. Further, it is meant for observers or spectators (theoroi) who are neither persuaded to make decisions nor are urged
34 Two recent treatments of this issue are Edward Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2nd ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 117–33; and Ugo Zilioli, Protagoras and the Challenge of Relativism: Plato’s Subtlest Enemy (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1–18. For physis/nomos, see Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 29–30. 35 Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 25; The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 261–63. 36 Plato, Meno 99c-100b. For a discussion of techne and its teachability in ancient Greece, see Cuomo, Technology and Culture, 22–29. 37 Lawrence W. Rosenfield, “The Practical Celebration of Epideictic,” in Rhetoric in Transition: Studies in the Nature and Uses of Rhetoric, ed. Eugene Edmond White (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), 131. 38 Rosenfield, 131. See Laurent Pernot’s recent treatment of epideictic, which describes (and argues against) a persistent hostility to epideictic: “Accustomed as we often are to think of rhetoric on the model of Demosthenes and to require of every oration a freedom of speech worthy of Athenian democracy (or our idea of it), we can be tempted to see in epideictic’s triumph [in the Greco-Roman world] the triumph of hollow or insincere words uttered in the context of a totalitarian regime, a useless meaningless thing.” Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 66. 13 to revise their opinions, as is the case with the judges (kritai) in law courts. Epideictic’s emphasis on “virtuoso performance” does, however, align it with the spectator art of poetry, and, as George A. Kennedy observes, there is no reason to take epideictic performance any less seriously than we do Greek tragedy.39 Given what we know about the ceremonial settings in which epideictic speeches were performed, immense cultural value was attached to them—in short, they could draw a crowd.40
Epideictic’s similarity to literary genres is not lost on Aristotle. In the Rhetoric, he makes frequent reference to poetry in order to illustrate how certain topics relate to different types of rhetorical proof. However, Aristotle is more concerned with rehabilitating rhetoric as the antistrophos, or “counterpart,” of Platonic dialectic. In Aristotle’s mind, both rhetoric and dialectic deal with commonly held opinions (endoxa) and through logical demonstration (apodeixis) both can communicate truth. This discussion is partly a reaction to Plato’s Gorgias, where Plato himself defines rhetoric as the antistrophos of dialectic, albeit with the negative connotation that it is just one of many kinds of “flattery”
(cosmetics, for example, are an antistrophos of medicine).41
Later writers who defend artistic speech, like Horace and Plutarch, will repeat this step of responding to Plato, though they do not focus on the ability of artistic discourse to match dialectic, nor do they systematically explicate how rhetoric is similar to dialectic in its capacity to reason about truth, virtue, or wisdom. Instead they focus on poetry as a
39 Kennedy, Art of Persuasion in Greece, 152–53. 40 For a description of ancient epideictic forums, see Jonathan Pratt, “The Epideictic Agōn and Aristotle’s Elusive Third Genre,” American Journal of Philology 133, no. 2 (2012): 177–208. 41 Aristotle, Rhetoric 1354a3-6, 1355a11; Plato, Gorgias 464b8. 14 paideutic art.
Horace argues in his Epistles that the poet is utilis urbi. He “serves the State” in
“small things,” molding the hearts of the young by “kindly precepts.” Plutarch, in How the
Young Man Should Study Poetry, makes the case that youths should not be denied access to poetry, where “the mythical and dramatic part grows all riotous through pleasure unalloyed,” but should rather be taught how to use philosophical precepts to “prune it and pinch it back.”42 Both authors are quite at home with the use of emotionally charged, eloquent speech that communicates virtue. Horace and Plutarch agree with Aristotle’s insistence, in his chapter on epideictic, that a speaker should be virtuous and understand the good. Their points about style also correlate with epideictic: it is a means of praising and blaming and a means of displaying verbal prowess. But poetry is shown here to serve pedagogical, ethical, and even civic ends, even if these are somewhat limited in their scope.
It is easy to see in despotic periods such as Augustan Rome evidence of a “decline” from deliberative rhetoric to the epideictic belletrism to which rhetoric descends when it is denied its “proper” democratic function—something akin to Kenneth Burke’s “pure persuasion,” persuasion for persuasion’s sake, or the “employment of rhetorical technique for itself.”43 However, in contexts where poetry and rhetoric look more or less alike, and where the verbal artistry of epideictic increasingly takes cues from the eloquence of poetry, epideictic as a general category that includes the poetic takes on a bigger share of
42 Horace, Epistles 2.1.124-133; Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry 1.15f-16. 43 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 267–94; Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 386. 15 persuasive work, demonstrating a greater range of argumentative motives than it otherwise might. (For example, in Augustan Rome, Horatian satire becomes a crucial means of vituperative discourse.) And when one argues that poetry must serve the state, as is the case with Plato, Plutarch, and Horace, this invites a greater degree of civic motives, in effect broadening poetry so that it reincorporates the range of rhetorical motives it once had. In other words, when poetry is seen as a type of rhetoric, and when rhetoric “proper” is primarily of the epideictic type, poetry has the potential to provide grounds for eloquence useful in pragmatic discourse or even to serve a pragmatic role itself.
The above, roughly, is Walker’s argument in his work on ancient rhetoric and poetics.44 Walker makes the crucial point that rhetorike is a fundamentally unstable category. This is thanks to Plato’s ambiguous use of the terms techne rhetorike (“the art of rhetoric”) and logon techne (“the art of discourse”), a terminology taken up by Aristotle.
The problem here is that if rhetoric is defined as a general faculty to which there corresponds a general art of reasoning—rhetoric being a “counterpart” to and virtually the same as dialectic—then there is no inherent need to keep rhetoric distinct from other discursive artistry. Rhetorike, then, “from the beginning is the misname of an art that keeps resolving itself back into, or that simply becomes, or that always was, something like an
Isocratean logon techne,” a broader art of discourse that harkens back to the sophists.45 The fact that out of the “disputative virtue” of the philosopher, as Philip Sidney would later put it, there might arise a notion of the poetic that coheres with a general art of discourse is
44 Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, ix. 45 Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, 39–40. 16 telling; it relates poetry back to the sophistic rhetoric that Plato and Aristotle reacted against46 but, as Walker demonstrates, to which techne rhetorike often, and perhaps inevitably, reverts.
There has also been substantial work done by Kathy Eden that seeks to rehabilitate the technical rhetoric derived from the judicial handbook tradition. According to Eden, these handbooks mark the beginning of modern textual hermeneutics. Technai make the distinction, as Aristotle does, between style (lexis) and proof (pistis). However, the principles of proof that applied to the three different kinds of oratory “belonged originally to one of them—the legal.”47 While Aristotle acknowledges that the proofs listed under epideictic are applicable to both deliberative and forensic oratory, Eden makes a persuasive case that the interpretation of poetry itself, as she argues elsewhere, is an “agonistic, adversarial affair.”48 Being an outgrowth of the legal tradition, poetics adopts legalistic strategies of interpretation more in line with critical judgment, or krisis, than with spectatorship.
Important also is that, in the hermeneutic tradition, poetry is a propaedeutic to philosophy, and this continues to be the case through the Renaissance.49 Since poetry is a mimesis of nature, and because poetry and nature are both governed by principles of decorum and harmony, philosophy provides the means, as Plutarch puts it, to “prune back,”
46 It should be noted, however, that Aristotle does at least hint at potential deliberative and forensic functions of the epideictic topics in Rhetoric 1.9. 47 Eden, “Hermeneutics and the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 5, no. 1 (1987): 60. 48 Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 2. 49 Eden, 34–5. 17 among other things, the poet’s or the young exegete’s fascination with stylistic richness.50
Bernard Weinberg explains how an appeal to these natural laws of decorum becomes a basic strategy in the Renaissance’s interpretation of the Poetics:
There is … a kind of total interpretation of the Poetics. It becomes a text in which poetry appears as a “natural” object, seeking on the one hand to present the perfection of the highest forms in Nature, the Ideas, and on the other hand to conform to more commonplace Nature as represented by the traditional practice of the poets and by the laws of decorum. That is, an ideal of beauty is proposed to the poet, but accompanied by an ideal of verisimilitude, which prevents any wild flights of the imagination. Everything that he does is reduced to rule and precept.51
Res, in other words, governs verba by moral or philosophical edict. While Eden demonstrates that there is a rhetorical aspect to poetry’s part in this critical practice, the spectator art of poetry is refashioned to conform to precepts that make it an attractive (and useful) educational tool.
During the Renaissance, it seems, the fate of poetry is largely that of its ancient counterpart; it becomes a subject for schoolroom exercises where “poetic lexis may endow the text with a certain elegance,” but where “the psychagogic force of poetic lexis, and of its prosody in particular, is greatly diminished.”52 Ancient theory comes to deemphasize prosody as a means of persuasion, and this looks to be the case in the Renaissance as well.
Concerns are not so much about speaking or composing well, but are instead about the moral ramifications of communicating literary critical precepts to youths who will use
50 Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry 1.15f-16 51 Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 1.420. 52 Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, 299. 18 similar precepts of behavioral and ethical decorum to govern themselves and the state.53
Or so it would seem. Overemphasizing this paideutic process means overlooking and underestimating the extent to which Renaissance poets and poetic theorists valued its performative capabilities. To take what are concerns about poetry in the schoolroom—in particular concerns about Plato’s critique and the way poetry is perceived to be dangerous, especially as it concerns the young—to be descriptive of the entire art of poetry will inevitably lead to a neglect of poetry’s rhetorical functions. And once you restrict prose argument, as often happens in despotic political climates, poetry becomes a much sharper persuasive tool, one that grows to include motives that are still—indeed, always are—there to be acted on. Only focusing on the humanist praise of poetry risks, as it were, driving out the sophists.
GRAMMARIANS AND CRITICS The previous section outlined how poetry, conceived as part of a broader logon techne that enacts and teaches eloquent performance, is distinct from a paideutic poetics developed in the critical, grammatical tradition. Much remains to be said about how ancient literary criticism—partly an outgrowth, as Eden and others have shown, of rhetorical
53 See Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, 1.295: “Others are quite capable of resisting, and hence are out of danger—mature and adult persons already formed by sound education, the sages of the city who have extraordinary faculties of discrimination, all those men who are morally disposed to goodness and virtue. The differentiating factor here is intelligence; the young and the ignorant cannot understand the true meanings of poetry and are led astray by its false appearances, whereas the old and the wise pierce beneath the illusory surface to the salutary teachings contained within. This involves a third assumption, that all poetry—even the comedies of Terence—is essentially allegorical in character, that what is visible to the eye and audible to the ear is but an imperfect representation of hidden truth perceptible only by the intellect.” See also Thomas Elyot, The Book Named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962), 28–40. 19 hermeneutics—developed into a discipline that considers poetry an autonomous art that functions in a manner wholly distinct from rhetoric.
Earl Miner argues for a distinction that is useful here, that between “literary” and
“critical” systems. According to Miner, a literary system sees literature as distinct from normal discourse but still defined by its relation to social ritual; a critical system, on the other hand, involves an awareness of a “distinct kind of knowledge with distinct functions”—a critical self-awareness, in other words, that is able to distinguish between the differing characteristics of literary genres.54 Miner has the following to say about the historical development of these systems:
Much evidence strongly suggests a fundamental pattern of development in both literary and critical systems: throughout the world the literary systems begin with lyric or narrative, and the critical systems with a poetics based on lyric or drama. The subsequent literary and critical history depends on the order in which other genres come to be esteemed or on the attempt to account for earlier practiced genres with a system devised far later.55
The solely Western emphasis on drama, or, more specifically, on mimesis as the definiens of poetry, is an important insight on Miner’s part. Western critical principles derive partly from critical engagement with texts in schoolrooms, where performative genres like lyric are of less use than narrative or allegorical—that is to say, mimetic—genres. However, as
Miner has shown, while the West’s critical system favors drama and other mimetic genres,
54 Earl Miner, “On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems: Part I,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 2 (1978): 345. 55 Miner, “On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems: Part II,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 3 (1979): 555. 20 lyric remains its foundational poetic mode.56
Critical principles originate in social ritual. In the literary system of archaic and ancient Greece, poetry was judged by how well it fit the sympotic and ceremonial occasions for which it was composed and performed. Andrew Ford has done extensive work tracing the lineage of criticism from its beginnings in these primitive poetic settings to its full development in the Poetics. He explains that “[m]any of the key terms of sympotic criticism, richly resonant and usefully flexible, were retained in rhetoric and poetics as a way of rooting formal verbal analysis in the old values of ‘propriety’ [to prepon], due
‘measure’ [metron], and ‘right’ behavior [kairos].”57 Moreover, Ford claims, the “social and moral values that Greek poetic theory could not, qua poetic theory, derive from its own formalist principles were rooted in the high leisure culture of archaic Greece.”58
Though the term “critic”—kritikos—dates from the late fourth century, the earliest hermeneutic practices began with the interpretation of oracular speech. After the rise of literacy and writing, however, this “purely” interpretive act becomes fundamentally distinct from rhetorical interpretation. The difference, in essence, has to do with the presence or absence of debate, the arguments over texts that define the “agonistic” nature of ancient hermeneutics. Rhetorically inflected hermeneutics has the critic posit a “thought
56 Miner contrasts Western with Indian and East Asian poetics, the latter of which foreground lyric. See the introduction to Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3–11. 57 Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 26. 58 Ford, 44. 21 or intention in the mind of the poet”—a dianoia—“which he expressed in words.”59
With Plato, the emphasis shifts from what the author means to the question of whether or not what he said was fitting. Poetry may then be defined as an art of sophisticated poetic expression, and the poet must be able to justify his artistic choices when questioned.60 In the Protagoras, the titular character explains:
I consider, Socrates, that the greatest part of a man’s education is to be in command of poetry, by which I mean the ability to understand the words of the poets, to know when a poem is correctly composed and when not, and to know how to either, because he will do the same as we would and be superfluous, analyze a poem and to respond to questions about it. So my line of questioning now will still concern the subject of our present discussion, namely virtue, but translated into the sphere of poetry.61
Literary judgment in Plato evokes its origins as a symposiastic “game,” where players would perform and critique poetry—what “Longinus” will later call logon krisis, “literary judgment,” which involves matters of ethical propriety justified to an interlocutor.62
The Protagoras anticipates Plutarch on this point. Eden directs us to a passage in
Plutarch regarding the student’s indoctrination into the principles of literary critique. A crucial factor for Plutarch is poetic representation (mimesis):
For by its essential nature the ugly cannot become beautiful; but the imitation, be it concerned with what is base or with what is good, if only it attain to the likeness, is commended. If, on the other hand, it produces a beautiful picture of an ugly body, it fails to give what propriety and probability require…. For it is not the same thing at all to imitate something beautiful and something beautifully, since “beautifully” means “fittingly and properly” and ugly things are “fitting and proper” for the
59 Ford, 84. 60 Ford, “The Purpose of Aristotle’s Poetics,” Classical Philology 110, no. 1 (2015): 4–5. 61 Plato, Protagoras 339a. 62 Ford, Origins of Criticism, 272 n.1; “Purpose of Aristotle’s Poetics,” 8. 22 ugly.63
What we have here is a recapitulation of rhetorical terminology in the service of instruction, namely “the appropriate” and its “congeners,” as Ford puts it—propriety, measure, and kairos.64 Absent here, though, are any social or discursive indications for the use of these terms. “The appropriate” in Plutarch does not refer to propriety, measure, or kairos as we might understand them in rhetoric, but instead to the author’s intention and how well it was carried out in its formal expression, how well this formal expression illuminates historical context, and its appropriateness in relation to philosophical or ethical principles. In short,
Plutarch outlines how to train a literary scholar, a grammatikos, who, unlike the poet-critic secure in his opinions and ready to play the symposiastic game of performance and critique, is “in need of good pilotage.”65
Lyric is simply less appropriate for such study than mimetic poetry. Plutarch, like
Plato, is concerned with shaping the souls of young men. However, it is Aristotle’s poetic theory—particularly his insistence on mimesis as its central criterion—that leads to the lyric’s outlier status in both ancient and Renaissance poetic theory.66
Aristotle’s theory depends on determining how poetry, as an autonomous art, has a specifically poetic effect on its audience. According to Weinberg, the Poetics “concentrates
63 Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 32–33; Plutarch, Moralia 18a-d. 64 Ford, Origins of Criticism, 12. 65 Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry 37b. 66 Plutarch himself most likely did not have access to the Poetics, though he was influenced by peripatetic philosophy. For a discussion of the texts in the Corpus Aristotelicum that Plutarch used, see F. H. Sandbach, “Plutarch and Aristotle,” Illinois Classical Studies 7, no. 2 (1982): 229. In the Italian Renaissance, the Poetics was known only indirectly through Averroës’ paraphrase until it was translated by Valla. For the use of Averroës’ paraphrase in the Italian Renaissance, see Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 88–89, 132. 23 its attention upon those qualities of the work of art itself which make it beautiful and productive of its proper effect”—a combination of admiration and catharsis that results from poetry working on the pathe. While Aristotle “is at no time neglectful either of the audience in whom this proper effect is produced or of the natural reality which is represented in the artificial work of art,” this effect is “produced by imitation and by representing some aspect of a natural object—its form—in the artificial medium of poetry.”67
This “aesthetic effect” makes poetry an art distinct from rhetoric in Weinberg’s mind—an object of theoretical critique. Also, there is the “universal” nature of Aristotle’s concept of audience. Weinberg explains:
Aristotle at all times bears in mind the presence of a contemplator who sees or reads and appreciates the poem. Statements about the “effect” of which I have spoken may be made either in terms of the kind of reaction within an audience or of the structural particularities within the work which produce that reaction. In either case, the audience is considered in a general way; it is a general and universal one, and never particularized through race, time, place, class, or personal idiosyncrasies. It is composed of men sharing the common feelings and experiences of all mankind, having the common conviction that actions spring from character and that events spring from causes, susceptible of enjoying the pleasures afforded by the imitative arts, and capable through their sensitivity and their habits of reading of distinguishing good works from bad. Otherwise, it has no distinctive qualities as an audience.68
Instead of a particular audience being addressed by poetry, Renaissance poetics assumes a general audience based on a normative conception of the self and its relation to reality— including a stable set of norms about what ought, in advance, to comprise any poetic logos.
67 Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, 1.350-351. 68 Weinberg, 1.351. 24 Such values were determined by what it meant in the Renaissance to be properly educated.
Since poetics provides grounds for assuming certain generalizable qualities about poetry and the audience, it allows one to critique poetry on a formal or generic basis and on the basis of how poetry adheres to defensible critical and ethical principles—principles, as we shall see, that are able to justify poetry’s use in the classroom.
Janet M. Atwill has argued that our ideas about the stable and normative nature of the self in Aristotle, derived from scholarly examinations of Aristotle’s corpus, belie
Aristotle’s concept of a malleable, “rhetorical” self. She contends that Aristotle was influenced by Isocrates and his broad and inclusive notion of discursive artistry—a logon techne, not a techne rhetorike. And Walker has shown that the Poetics and the Rhetoric have more in common than previously thought. He claims that the Poetics describes a
“technē … for the katharsis by means of logos, discourse, of the pathē involved in practical judgment, choice, and action.” Walker notes how the means for achieving the poetic effects that Aristotle describes—as a function of energeia—approach what Chaïm Perelman calls
“techniques of presence,” or the techniques rhetors use to make their arguments more evident in the minds of their audience. Walker notes that Aristotle’s poetic techne must, to some degree, conform to Perelman’s idea of presence and that the “various methods of amplification/iteration (or ‘dwelling on’ a topic), as well as ‘imagery,’ rhythm and intonation, figures of speech, and methods of delivery” are, in poetic lexis, functionally
25 equivalent to those of the “rhetorical art that Aristotle turns to” in the Rhetoric.69
Weinberg’s observations are still useful, however; he outlines in detail the
Neoplatonic and Horatian tinge the Poetics took on in the Renaissance, as well the pedagogical role that poetry played in the formation of student-scholars who were essentially grammatikoi-in-training. But the audience of poetry corresponds not so much to Weinberg’s description of an audience with “no distinctive qualities” as to Perelman’s
“universal audience.” Perelman explains the difference between universal and particular audiences in the following way:
The conceptions people form of the real can vary widely, depending on the philosophical views they profess. However, everything in argumentation that is deemed to relate to the real is characterized by a claim to validity vis-à-vis the universal audience. On the contrary, all that pertains to the preferable, that which determines our choices and does not conform to a preexistent reality, will be connected with a specific viewpoint which is necessarily identified with some particular audience, though it may be a large one.70
Poetic theory, in other words, is discourse by a particular audience about a particular audience. It deals with what its proponents find preferable, but it must also justify itself by a “claim to validity vis-à-vis the universal audience.” Such a condition is to be expected because if “all audiences are constructed, then their views of the real and the preferable, as imagined by the speaker, must form the initial common ground between speaker and
69 Walker, “Pathos and Katharsis in ‘Aristotelian’ Rhetoric: Some Implications,” in Rereading Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 85; see also Chaïm Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric, trans. William Kluback (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 33–40. 70 Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 66. 26 audience, the starting points of any argumentation.”71
Regarding poetic theory, this audience is made up primarily of critics. The preferences of Aristotle, Plato, and others are present throughout discussions of poetics and rhetoric in the Renaissance. Sidney, for example, decries the use of “Nizolian paper-books” full of “figures and phrases”72—the prime source of those poetic techniques of energeia, or “presence,” that overlap with rhetoric—while he outlines a poetic theory that is essentially rhetorical and based on poetry’s capacity to delight.
Indeed, Sidney is perhaps the premier literary critic in English. Gavin Alexander has argued that Sidney’s Defence of Poetry is a “Neoplatonic response to Plato’s critique of imitation.”73 Sidney uses Aristotle, but prefers the imitation of character to Aristotle’s imitation of action.74 This difference is likely due to Sidney’s seeing mimesis in ethical terms, “images of virtues” being a likely reference to Republic 10 (or a possible reference to Aristotle’s discussion of the mimesis of ethos in Poetics 6).75 In any case, Sidney feels the need to defend poetry on a paideutic basis, not in terms of dramatic unity or probability.
Defending poetry means that one is less concerned with poetry’s ability to “encourage” one to “belief and action”76 than with appreciating how well its idea or “fore-conceit” is
71 Alan Gross, “A Theory of the Rhetorical Audience: Reflections on Chaim Perelman,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 2 (1999): 204. 72 Philip Sidney, “The Defence of Poetry,” in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan A. van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 117. 73 Gavin Alexander, ed., Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), lx. 74 Aristotle, Poetics 1449b24–25, 1451b33–52a11. 75 Aristotle, Poetics 1450a. 76 For Walker’s full discussion of active enthymematic, or syllogistic, dramatic “premises” acting on the emotions, see Walker, “Pathos and Katharsis,” 84–85. 27 expressed.77
Sidney’s famous “fore-conceit” might seek to rehabilitate the “fine thoughts” (kalai dianoiai) of the rhapsode derided by Plato. According to Ford, citing Plutarch, “an education in poetry could still be called incomplete without an acquaintance with the
‘under-meanings’ (huponoiai) available from a different class of experts.” Sidney is responding to the fact that Plato and Aristotle isolated a uniquely literary judgment from the context of archaic poetic situations, making the kritikos a “master and decoder of difficult books” rather than of performances.78 Sidney’s “speaking picture” is at once a rehabilitation of Plato’s concept of dianoia—in Sidney’s case, a “discursive” engagement with a text’s “speech,” a picture or idea that speaks the author’s words. It is also a synthesis of this concept with the interpretation of allegorical “under-meanings,” or huponoiai, that will mark Sidney’s audience as a discriminating one. Like Aristotle, Sidney writes not for aspiring poets but for an audience that gets pleasure from speculating what constitutes good poetry.
Here we can return to Miner’s point about mimesis being central to Western poetics.
77 Sidney’s is a brilliant reformulation of discussions about poetic “ideas” in continental poetics. Sidney references such “learned philosophers as Fracastorius [Girolamo Fracastoro] and [Julius Caesar] Scaliger.” Regarding the poetic expression of ideas in Fracastoro, and the view of ideas generally in the period, here is Joel Elias Spingarn: “Fracastoro’s conception of beauty approximates both to the Platonic and to the more purely aesthetic doctrines which we have mentioned; and he expounds and elaborates this aesthetic notion in the following manner. Each art has its own has its own rules of proper expression…. But to the poet no grace, no embellishment, no ornament, is ever alien; he does not consider the particular beauty of any one field … but all that pertains to the simple idea of beauty and of beautiful speech. Yet this universalized beauty is no extraneous thing; it cannot be added to objects in which it has no place.” A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 32–33. The response to Plato, in short, was also a response to Aristotle’s idea that the representation of even ugly or unsightly things can be a source of pleasure. 78 Ford, Origins of Criticism, 293. 28 This is due to the fact that the two most influential expositors of poetic mimesis, Plato and
Aristotle, take obvious pride of place in the Western critical tradition.79 In the Renaissance, we see a similar phenomenon happening with Sidney. That Aristotle sought to rehabilitate poetry in terms of its imitative capacity in order to defend it against Plato’s attack, and that he and his ilk simply preferred drama to non-mimetic genres such as lyric,80 leads centuries later to a Sidnean poetics where the poet may fly within the “zodiac of his own wit” but must defend himself according to precepts borrowed from hermeneutic, critical paideia.
For Sidney, the lyric is second only to “heroic” poetry, and in numerous passages in the Defence it is presented as dignified and even divine. However, as Wesley Trimpi has remarked, Sidney’s thoughts on lyric seem “scattered and unsystematic.”81 Sidney’s hardline adherence to versification being “no cause to poetry” tempers his soaring rhetoric about lyric’s merits.82 Whatever the reason, it is certainly peculiar given the early modern proclivity for lyric that it would remain so undertheorized.
This predicament, again, can be traced to Plato, who, when referencing the “old quarrel between poetry and philosophy,” famously outlaws from his city-state all poetry except divine hymns and encomia. In his discussion with Glaucon, Socrates remarks:
And so, Glaucon, when you happen to meet those who praise Homer and say that he’s the poet who educated Greece, that it’s worth taking up his works in order to learn how to manage and educate people, and that one should arrange one’s whole
79 Miner, “Literary Systems: Part I,” 350. 80 Technically, for Aristotle and Plato, lyric is less mimetic—all poetry is imitation. Lyric is either the poet’s own report or a narrative, but it still represents good character in Plato or, in Aristotle, action. Drama, for both, is entirely defined by mimesis, however. See Poetics 1448a and Republic 394b-c. 81 Wesley Trimpi, “Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 198. 82 Sidney, “Defence of Poetry,” 81. 29 life in accordance with his teachings, you should welcome these people and treat them as friends, since they’re as good as they’re capable of being, and you should agree that Homer is the most poetic of the tragedians and the first among them. But you should also know that hymns to the gods and eulogies to good people are the only poetry we can admit into our city. If you admit the pleasure-giving Muse, whether in lyric or epic poetry, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead of law or the thing that everyone has always believed to be best, namely, reason.83
Poetry is a corrupting influence because of bad imitations, and only the least mimetic and most virtuous of the poetic genres—lyric hymns—should therefore be allowed. Poetic mimesis deals with appearances, with only the “images of virtues” (in the negative sense of a counterfeit). Also, the poet tends toward “womanish” displays of emotion, being carried away with poetic histrionics.84 Whether poetry, including “lyrics in other meters,” will be readmitted rests on poetry’s “defenders, who aren’t poets themselves but lovers of poetry” who will show that poetry is not just “pleasant” but “beneficial.”85
We could answer Plato here with Sidney:
First, truly, a man might maliciously object that Plato, being a philosopher, was a natural enemy of poets. For indeed, after the philosophers had picked out of the sweet mysteries of poetry the right discerning true points of knowledge, they forthwith putting it in method, and making a school-art of that which the poets did only teach by a divine delightfulness, beginning to spurn at their guides, like ungrateful prentices, were not content to set up shops for themselves, but sought by all means to discredit their masters; which by the force of delight being barred them, the less they could overthrow them, the more they hated them.86
“Making a school art” of the poetic philosophia first dispensed by poets undermines poetry’s “force of delight,” or its “divine delightfulness.” Like Plato, Sidney would
83 Plato, Republic 607a. 84 Plato, Republic 605e. 85 Plato, Republic 607e. 86 Sidney, “Defence of Poetry,” 107. 30 disagree that poetry can be justified in terms of its “force of delight,” yet unlike Plato he does not discount wholly the “delightfulness” that lends efficacy and energy to that divine art.
THE LYRIC AS RITUAL DISCOURSE As far back as Gorgias and even after the “literaturization” of rhetoric, we can see that poetry is widely considered metered prose, defined not so much by mimesis as by the
“force of delight” of its prosodic attributes. In the Evagoras, in fact, Isocrates presents himself as hamstrung in his attempt to write an encomium in prose. He refers directly to the advantages of poetry in the following excerpt:
I know that what I am about to do is difficult—praising a man’s excellence through a speech (logoi). The greatest proof of this is that those who concern themselves with philosophy (philosophia) venture to speak on many other subjects of every different kind, but none of them has ever attempted to write on this matter. I have great sympathy for them, for many decorations (kosmoi) have been granted to poets. They can write of gods interacting with humans, conversing and fighting alongside whomever they may wish, and they can portray this not only with conventional language but also with borrowings, new terms and metaphors, not neglecting anything but embellishing their compositions with every figure (eidos).87
Isocrates takes particular pains to identify the power of poetic logos. He outlines poetry’s power to narrate a scene that is enticing to its audience, which roughly conforms to
Aristotelian mythos or Sidney’s Neoplatonic fore-conceit. But he also decries what amounts to a type of rhetorical “cheating,” where the poet is able to entice his audience and thereby make the weaker argument seem stronger. He goes on:
Such devices do not exist for prose writers. . . . In addition, the former compose everything in meter and rhythm; the latter have no share in these things which have
87 Isocrates, Evagoras 8-9. 31 such great grace that they persuade their audiences by their fine rhythms and proportions, even if the style and arguments are inelegant. One might recognize their power from the following consideration: if some well-regarded poem were to keep its words and ideas while losing its meter, it would appear to fall far short of the opinion we now have of it.88
“Still,” Isocrates continues, “although poetry has a great advantage, we must not hesitate to attempt prose speeches to see if good men may be praised by such speeches just as well as by those who celebrate them in song and meter.”89
Though Isocrates seems to prefer prose to versified epideictic, this could just as well be a declaration of the foundational role philosophia (as described in the Antidosis) has in rhetorical study—those who speak wisely and act nobly become noble through the study of rhetoric, now considered distinct from poetry. Isocrates, like Gorgias in the Helen, considers poetic logos to have a drug-like effect on the hearer who it persuades by a kind of direct psychic force. But he also considers poetry to be principally, and simply, defined by whether it is composed in meter (metron). The end of “poetic” and “rhetorical” discourse is the same, to persuade the hearer by affecting the psyche.
In the Helen, Gorgias famously argues for the power of logos as follows:
But if it was speech [logos] which persuaded her and deceived her heart, not even to this is it difficult to make an answer and to banish blame as follows. Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish griefs and create joy and nurture pity. I shall show how this is the case, since it is necessary proof to the opinion of my hearers: I both deem and define all poetry as speech with meter. Fearful shuddering and tearful pity and grievous longing come upon its hearers, and at the actions and physical sufferings of others in good fortunes and evil fortunes, through the agency
88 Evagoras 9-11. 89 Evagoras 11. 32 of words, the soul is wont to experience a suffering of its own.90
Stephen Halliwell notes that Gorgianic prose, particularly the statement that “I both deem and define all poetry as speech with meter” (τὴν ποίησιν ἅπασαν καὶ νοµίζω καὶ ὀνοµάζω
λόγον ἔχοντα µέτρον91), “pushes its quasi-poetic artifice to the point of manifesting a near metrical element of rhythmic patterning.”92 Gorgias, Halliwell observes, “emphasizes that poetry is essentially an exhibition of logos,” and that “whatever can be predicated of poetry, with the single exception of its metrical form, must exemplify properties of all logos.”93
And “[f]earful shuddering and tearful pity” begins to sound somewhat like Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, poetry acting as a kind of techne for purging “fearful shuddering” and
“tearful pity”—the pathemata, or “emotional things,” of the Poetics.
In fact, Gorgias is not far in his description here from Aristotle’s account of the effect of music in the Politics, that “[r]hythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change.”94 Though speaking of the good character that musical education helps instill,
Aristotle applies to music the psychagogic force that Gorgias and Isocrates apply to poetic logos. Aristotle, in a famous parenthetical remark, limits the purgative effects of speech to
90 Gorgias, Encomium of Helen 8-9. 91 Gorgias, Helen 9. 92 Stephen Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 269. 93 Halliwell, 270. 94 Aristotle, Politics 1340a. 33 mimetic poetry: “the word ‘purgation’ [catharsis] we use at present without explanation, but when hereafter we speak of poetry, we will treat the subject with more precision”95— which, of course, he never does.
In Gorgias’ mind, however, logos in a general sense, not just rhetorical or poetic logos, is the source of the medicinal, bodily, ethos-altering effects. “Sacred incantations” are powerful because they are “sung with words” that are the themselves the “bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain,” and which work by “merging with opinion in the soul.”96
Gorgias’ notion of logos as verbal “witchcraft” locates in both metered and unmetered epideictic speech the psychagogic enticement Aristotle relegates to the rhythmic and melodic mimesis of the emotions found in music.
But with Aristotle what we have also is a poetic theory that must account for a much wider spectrum of independent arts—the arts of logos, rhetoric and poetry, must now be considered different in function and effect even if they are only nominally distinct. In other words, for poetry to be considered more than versified prose, a criterion of literary mimesis—fiction—was required.97
Halliwell makes several important observations about the use of mimetic terminology in Aristotle. All uses of this terminology signify an inherent property shared by art and artist: “Aristotle speaks of mimesis both as an intrinsic property of works of art and as the product of artistic intentionality,” Halliwell claims, and that “the subject of the
95 Aristotle, Politics 1341b. 96 Gorgias, Helen 10. 97 Ford, Origins of Criticism, 249. 34 verb mimeisthai can be an individual work, a genre, an artist, or a performer of art.” For
Aristotle, “[m]imetic attributes belong to art works in their own right, not merely as communicative intermediaries between artist and audience.”98 And why mimesis acts for
Aristotle as the definiens of poetry can, once more, be traced to his insistence on rehabilitating imitation:
Aristotle is working out a notion of the fictional or fictive (in the older and basic sense of the feigned and invented) and marking off its boundaries both from particular areas of knowledge and inquiry (history, natural science, philosophy) where canons of truth would obtain, and from the logical status of the discourse which belongs to such fields. It is interesting that Aristotle eschews the term pseudos (falsehood) in characterizing fiction. A telling contrast can be drawn with Plato, Republic 2-3: there Plato gives pseudos something like the status of “fiction,” when he declares all stories and myths to be essentially pseudeis (376e-77a), but he goes on to undermine any positive value for this conception by bringing emphatic charges of falsehood against Homer and other poets.
It is therefore not just because Aristotle seeks to classify poetry independently from rhetoric; he also seeks to avoid a negative or unclear notion of Platonic pseudos, and instead focuses on mimesis, a concept that emerges from “the cumulative determination of the properties which differentiate poetic artefacts from other uses of language.”99
What this critical move by Aristotle means for poetry is that its prosodic, incantatory dimension is overshadowed by a “dramatistic” interpretation of how it works.
98 Halliwell, “Aristotelian Mimesis Reevaluated,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 28, no. 4 (1990): 490. 99 Halliwell, 501. For Halliwell’s more recent, extended treatment of mimesis from Plato and Aristotle to contemporary theory, see The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). For the archaic origins of the verb mimeisthai and how it denotes a practice of poetic performance, reperformance, and early agonistic discourse, see Gregory Nagy, “Early Greek Views of Poets and Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 1: Classical Criticism, ed. George A. Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–77. 35 Walker explains:
We can argue, first, that the Aristotelian re-imagining of lyric constrains the actual production of poems only to the degree that it shapes the expectations and interpretive strategies of the poet and the poet’s intended or imagined audience, and that throughout much of western literary history this constraining has been variable, mitigated by non-Aristotelian ideas of poetic discourse, and not especially severe. The Renaissance lyric, for example, does frequently tend toward apostrophic or dramatic presentation, even a staginess in which the poet plays the role of a conventional type, but it also remains highly discursive, argumentative, and prosodically inventive; the Aristotelian paradigm appears to be more a conditioning than a controlling presence, an “undertow” which pulls both reader and poet toward a preference for the dramatistic, while other things remain about the same.100
We have seen how lyric resists theory of the mimetic kind seen in ancient and Renaissance poetics, and as “epideictic song” it “belongs … to the domain of theory” broadly speaking.
Lyric, that is, “invites its listener/‘spectator’ (or theoros) to an act of contemplation, evaluation, and judgment.”101 As a spectator-centric art that disposes opinions in a ritual utterance, its performative nature invites judgment of how well the poet represents attitudes in “prosodically inventive” speech. We can therefore conceive of poetic mimesis in its much earlier, much broader sense of “representation” that applies to “any public discourse whatsoever.”102 All language represents, not just poetry, and this brings poetry much closer to conventional rhetoric.
As noted earlier in this chapter, Walker has demonstrated how sung discourse functioned as primitive, ritual utterance. Walker also charts a shift in terminology from aoidê to poiesis—from “song” to “poetry.” With the advent of writing, epideictic no longer
100 Walker, “Aristotle’s Lyric: Re-Imagining the Rhetoric of Epideictic Song,” College English 51, no. 1 (1989): 15. 101 Walker, 8. 102 Walker, 10. 36 falls strictly within the domain of metered discourse—within, that is, the domain of rhythmic speech that can be easily memorized and recalled. “The upshot of this development,” says Walker, was the “displacement of the traditional alignments and oppositions between epideictic and pragmatic, permanent and ‘ephemeral,’ and verse and nonverse discourse”:
Whatever the aetiology of the developments may be, however, their upshot is reasonably clear. By the fifth century, the category of oral/archaic epideictic, which for Hesiod had been quite simply the domain of “song,” had become an array of sung and spoken meters, modes, and strophic forms that could no longer be contained by the term aoidê. Nor could the aoidos suffice for a class that included declaiming rhapsodes, actors, singers who composed for choral and theatrical performances. Poiêsis and poitês, then, emerged as the terms of choice for the artful invention of metered discourse of all kinds, for the artful discourse itself, and for its artificers.103
In this stage of what Kennedy calls the “literaturization” of rhetoric,104 prose was simply the non-melic counterpart to melic poetic-epideictic discourse that constituted a broad range of discursive artistry.105
By the Hellenistic period, this generalized logon techne—an art of epideictic discourse in verse and prose106—became a ramified network of discursive practices, which, even after the distinction was made between “poetic” and “rhetorical” art,107 never really
103 Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, 21. 104 Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 129. 105 Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, 51. 106 Epideictic as a foundational poetic genre is also argued for by Nagy. He claims that the “two foundational principles” of archaic poetry were épainos and psógos, “praise” and “blame,” and their equivalent terms. According to Nagy, “praise poetry recognizes its own deeply traditional nature by describing itself as a primordial institution”—i.e., as the source of the praise and blame on which a society so concerned with kleos, “glory,” depends. See The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 228. 107 For a discussion of this distinction, see Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, 34–41; and Edward Schiappa, “Did Plato Coin ‘Rhetorike’?,” American Journal of Philology 111, no. 4 (1990): 457–70. 37 acted independently of one another. Epideictic-poetic art became studied, as it was in earlier sophistic paideia, for its practical application in pragmatic, civic discourse.
Eloquence was seen as psychagogic forcefulness, able to entice a student and an audience through a direct appeal to the soul.108
That Aristotle simplified this extensive network of epideictic modes and made it palatable for an audience of academic elites has been widely recognized. Edward Schiappa and David M. Timmerman, for example, argue that the fact that poetic and rhetorical genres overlap is at least implicit in Aristotle’s own writings:
Discussion in judicial and deliberative settings typically was followed by a nearly immediate vote on an accusation, motion, or decree, so that the audience served as judges (kritai) and were empowered to take action on the matter at hand. Since direct and immediate action was not normally associated with enkomia, panegyrics, or epitaphioi, Aristotle describes the audience member for such speeches as a “spectator” (theoros)—not unlike an audience for a poetry performance or the theater. The similarity is no accident, for Aristotle’s description of epideictic rhetoric as prose speeches of praise and blame reproduces the longstanding tradition of poetry of praise and blame, called ainos or epainos and psogos, respectively.109
Aristotle, however, “often failed to appreciate the more poetic styles of certain composition traditions,” which may have “led him to underestimate the significance of certain forms of epideictic address.” The “panegyrics of Isocrates and Gorgias, and the preserved epitaphioi
108 For psychagogic poetry and prose as the “starting point” for rhetorical, as opposed to grammatical, instruction, see Walker’s discussion of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s teaching method: “The student is thus asked, and expected, to feel the charm and power of Homer’s and Herodotus’ language. This directly felt effect is the starting point for instruction.” While the “Hellenistic kritikoi (grammarians)” assumed “the goal of criticism is aesthetic appreciation,” Dionysius takes “aisthêsis, ‘sense perception,’ to be the natural starting point for rhetorical criticism and instruction, but the goal is instruction”—i.e., instruction in how to compose, not how to analyze or judge a speech or text. Genuine Teachers of This Art, 236–37. 109 Schiappa and David M. Timmerman, “Aristotle’s Disciplining of Epideictic,” in The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Ancient Greece, ed. Edward Schiappa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 199–200; see also Nagy, Best of the Achaeans, 222–42. 38 of Pericles (in Thucydides) and Plato (in the Menexenus) represented a form of literature in contrast to the urgent and fierce political and judicial debates taking place in the assembly and in the courts.”110 Aristotle demotes genres of epideictic lyric poetry and at the same time elevates epideictic prose, principally due to its being more distinguished and more “literary” than pragmatic speech, the latter being less preferable in the literate circles of which Aristotle was a part.
The way in which Aristotle recognizes the power of epideictic modes while at the same time he discounts the means by which they acquire such power—what Walker has called Aristotle’s “double vision”—is recapitulated in the Renaissance with Sidney, who like Aristotle avoids defining poetry as metered logos. He prefers to define poetic art according to the practices of “right poets,” who are unlike the “meaner” sorts who merely
“counterfeit”—Sidney’s version of Platonic pseudos—and whose art is neither urbane nor ethical.111 Aristotle’s comment in the Poetics—that “it is the way with people to tack on
‘poet’ to the name of a metre, and talk of elegiac-poets and epic-poets, thinking they call them poets not by reason of the imitative nature of their work, but indiscriminately by reason of the metre they write in”112—is for Sidney a means to foreground the ethical capacity of poetry irrespective of genre:
The most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satiric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others,113 some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with, some by the sorts of verses they liked best to write in; for indeed the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numbrous
110 Schiappa and Timmerman, “Aristotle’s Disciplining of Epideictic,” 205. 111 Sidney, 80-81. 112 Aristotle, Poetics 1447b. 113 Interestingly, Sidney uses Horace’s subdivision of poetry according to its versification (Ars Poetica 70- 98), as Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan A. van Dorsten point out. See Sidney, 191 n.81.24-5. 39 kind of writing which is called verse—indeed but apparelled, verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry, since there have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets. For Xenophon, who did imitate so excellently as to give us effigiem iusti imperii, the portraiture of a just empire, under the name of Cyrus, (as Cicero saith of him) made therein an absolute heroical poem. So did Heliodorus in his sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagenes and Chariclea; and yet both these wrote in prose: which I speak to show that it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet—no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who though he pleaded in armour should be an advocate and no soldier. But it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by; although indeed, the senate of poets hath chosen verse as their fittest raiment, meaning, as in matter they passed all in all, so in manner to go beyond them: not speaking (table-talk fashion or like men in a dream) words as they chanceably fall from the mouth, but peising each syllable of each word by just proportion according to the dignity of the subject.
Sidney portrays right poets as an embattled class who, though they “merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach; and delight, to move men to take that goodness in hand … which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them.”114 Sidney’s is perhaps the most brilliant polemical expression of a critic—versification is not bad or ineffectual per se (it is, in fact, the “fittest raiment”); it is just the least interesting of the poetic phenomena with which an educated person should be familiar.
It is here that we may note a kind of tension in the critical tradition that arises from considering both the power of lyric as eloquence, derived from its former status as a versified oration, and how it conforms to a genre defined by uniquely poetic criteria determined by critics. Modern critics will often describe the lyric more amorphously, in terms of its prosodic elements, but will quickly revert to discussions about how lyric might
114 Sidney, 81-82. 40 be classified according to broader poetic categories. It is largely, as it was long ago, a problem of terminology.
Once again, we may look to Culler’s attempt to synthesize these elements. The
“possibility of studying the language and the figures of lyric as formal structure,” Culler remarks, was “cut short by a rush into reader-response criticism, which urged critics to interpret what readers, informed readers, or superreaders had perceived.”115 Though Culler takes pains in his recent scholarship to distance his theory of lyric from hermeneutics, he compensates by focusing on the formal execution of lyric, examining the excellence of that formal execution. This move risks judging lyric in exactly the terms that render it an autonomous poetic artifact, which in turn belies Culler’s excellent discussion of its history as formalized epideictic rhetoric. Though he outlines a masterfully succinct account of how lyric works as epideictic, Culler’s focus is still on what this tells us about how a given lyric poem fits into the broader critical category of lyric poetry:
Poetics and hermeneutics may be difficult to separate in practice, but in theory they are quite distinct: they come at literature from opposite directions. Given a text, hermeneutics wants to find the meaning…. Poetics works in the opposite direction, asking what are the conventions that enable this work to have the sorts of meanings and effects it does for readers. It does not attempt to find a meaning but to understand the techniques that make meaning possible, techniques that belong to the generic tradition.116
Technique, the artistry that is involved in an autonomous poetic techne, is still more closely linked here to the critical tradition than to rhetorical performance. Though Culler refers to
115 Culler, “Changes in the Study of the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 43. 116 Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 5–6. 41 the effects that poetry has on an audience, the ritualistic elements of lyric still act as an enticement to understand the techniques by which a lyric means. Culler is concerned, then, with what makes a given lyric a lyric proper, which is a question that arises because he addresses the pedagogical problem of how we should teach students to interpret lyrics.
Culler’s call for a more robust lyric poetics means that the reader must be first educated as to what lyric is and what best defines it, which is a valid yet fundamentally different question from asking what it means to experience lyric as an audience—asking, in other words, how it functions as rhetoric. Furthermore, considering lyric as a type of rhetoric invites questions about how a particular lyric in a particular circumstance persuades its audience, which makes the occasionality of lyric crucial for a complete examination of its artistic success.
We may compare Culler’s approach with Greene’s, who in the introduction to his
Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence examines the lyric sequence as one continuous mode existing since Petrarch:
My experience with texts such as the ones treated here convinces me that the Western lyric sequence from Petrarch to the present day is a single form with a more or less constant set of principles. To any reader with an eye for unities and a tolerance for superficial changes in literary habit over time, this proposition will command clear support: the line of inheritance, and the evidence of collective tinkering with these goods held in common, are plain enough. But this departs from a convention of treating works composed during the Renaissance—or even the Renaissance as it happened in a particular place—as though they are necessarily at one with each other but innocent of later developments, or of describing modern and postmodern varieties of the lyric sequence as though they were entirely new.117
The subtle difference Greene outlines here is the ongoing kairotic pressure that various
117 Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: 42 situations exert on poets, inciting them to reinvent the lyric—inventio in the rhetorical sense of the term, dealing with how typical situations and conventions impose restrictions on what subject matter is presented. In short, Greene is interested in what makes the lyric useful in the recurrent situations that seem to call for it. The lyric’s “ritualized” performance is one that invites the reperformance of an incantatory “script”—“the poem’s office as directions for performance,” or “a script, that is, compounded of sounds that serve referential or expressive purposes in nonpoetic contexts, other sounds … that have no poetic context, and the patterns that organize these sounds in the reader-auditor’s experience.”118
However, in his survey of lyric sequences, he insists that the lyric represents a collection of fictive, dramatized statements of feeling. Greene veers very close here to the conventional view of lyric that threatens to undermine his much more radical notion that the particularized situations for which lyrics are written invite reperformance of the lyric
“script.” He considers the ritual aspects of lyric to be essential to its success, but not a defining feature of what makes the lyric poetic—poetry, in his mind, goes hand in hand with fiction, with a kind of Aristotelian mythos carried out in a continuous fictive sequence.
Here, I think, we come to the central classificatory problem regarding the lyric.
“The study of genres has to be founded on the study of convention,” Northrop Frye writes.119 Generic or conventional classification of the lyric, though, often confounds our
Princeton University Press, 1991), 4. 118 Greene, 5. 119 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 96. 43 understanding of the multitude of situations that lyric poetry addresses and the means by which it does so. Furthermore, the tripartite division of epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry—a division not fully established until Goethe claimed these to be the natural poetic kinds— makes “lyric” out to be a critical term that, like “epideictic,” risks both overgeneralization and oversimplification.
It is Frye himself who comes closest to a sophistic, “ritual” rhetoric of the lyric. For example, he notes how lyric is a type of specialized or “discontinuous” occasional discourse that interrupts ordinary experience in a way similar to music, in that the “element of occasion means that the poem revolves around that occasion, instead of continuing indefinitely.”120 Like Gorgias, Frye associates logos with magic, a verbal “charm” derived from carmen, or “song.”121 He explains that “lyric turns away, not merely from ordinary space and time, but from the kind of language we use in coping with ordinary experience”—and that this means that lyric represents a self-contained “verbal reality” that transports the reader through the power of the word.122 In describing how lyric deals with situations that are often “discontinuous,” or out of the ordinary, such as an encomium recited on a special occasion, Frye refers to the formal elements of lyric as “marked” language, language that is fundamentally different from “ordinary” pragmatic speech. This is a broadly epideictic dimension that fully encompasses the lyric, particularly the lyric’s ability to “sum up” through communally directed language an important situation or
120 Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 32. 121 Frye, “Charms and Riddles,” in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Markham: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2006), 123. 122 Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” 34. 44 convey meanings and values that act to unify a group.
To summarize, lyric has special claim to rhetorical situations that retain features of the ancient, ritualistic contexts for epideictic logos. By removing poetry from its performative contexts, the paideutic tradition since Aristotle emphasizes instead what distinguishes the lyric and other genres of poetry from highly formalized epideictic prose.
Rather than conventional or generic in this poetic sense, I argue that the lyric is best understood rhetorically as social and situational, constituting a language of shared experience, what Burke would call the “substance” of a group cooperating or “acting- together.”123
LYRIC GENRES AND EPIDEICTIC PERFORMATIVITY If we are to account for the lyric as a conventional or generic category on its own, we must also account for this communal “acting-together.” I propose that the genre of lyric be considered in terms of how it constitutes a type of “social action,” which is how genre is defined in modern rhetorical theory.
Carolyn R. Miller proposes five criteria for rhetorical genres, two of which are relevant here. The first is that “[g]enre refers to a conventional category of discourse based in large-scale typification of rhetorical action.” Genre, in other words, “acquires meaning from the situation and from the social context in which that situation arose.” The second is that “genre is a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence; it motivates by connecting the private with the public, the singular with the recurrent.”124
123 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 21. 124 Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 2 (1984): 163. 45 While conventional, rhetorical genres are classified based on the action they perform in social situations. It is the situation that requires a specific form of discourse, rather than a sense of critical propriety per se. Miller’s definition of genre ties the substance and form of speech to the “type situations” of Burke and to the exigence of “rhetorical situations” as defined by Lloyd F. Bitzer.125
A possible source of difficulty in accounting for the lyric generically can be articulated now in rhetorical terms. Miller argues that there are three “hierarchies” of discourse: substance (semantics), form (syntactics), and rhetorical action (pragmatics).126
Failure of these to “rationally” cohere in speech means for Miller the failure of speech to act as a rhetorical genre; speech must function on all three discursive levels to achieve its intended effects. One way a class of discourse can fail a genre claim is if “there is no pragmatic component, no way to understand the genre as a social action.” This failure is due to the fact that such speech does not “achieve a rational fusion of [the] elements” of
“form and substance” in spite of a “recurring rhetorical situation” because it presents
“conflicting interpretive contexts.”
“Lyric” fails a rhetorical genre claim because its interpretation is not necessarily tied to the social action it might perform or might once have performed. Epideictic subcategories are the lyric’s proper rhetorical genres. If we want to understand lyric epideixis on a generic basis, it must be studied, somewhat counterintuitively, in this more
125 Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (1968): 1–14; Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 293–94. 126 Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” 152. 46 particularized manner.
In one of the most comprehensive books on the subject, Alastair Fowler observes that, “[i]nsofar as there are genre systems,” such systems are “are apparently governed as much by inherited contingencies of literature at particular times as by synchronic genre logic.” He goes on to note that “genres have very little taxonomic potential, since they lack the status of fixed categories.”127 This does not, however, mean that literary genres are useless:
If genre is of little value in classification, what then is it good for? This book has set out the idea that it is a communication system, for the use of writers in writing, and readers and critics in reading and interpreting. No writer needs to be persuaded of the value of genre. Studying it enables him to orient his composition to previous work. And, more creatively, it extends a positive challenge or “invitation to form.” Indeed, activity in genre theory has tended to precede or coincide with periods of great literature, and to arouse the interest of the best writers.128
Fowler’s description of literary genre here is, I think, one of the best in terms of outlining the practical function of literary genres. Mindful of the limitations of generic terminology, he makes the important point that genres are useful for critics and act as sources of inspiration and invention for writers seeking to imitate and innovate within a given poetic form. In other words, genre orients critics and writers within a critical system—which
Fowler sees as a communication between writers and critics across the history of literature, effectively an extension of the friendly sympotic competition and “problem game” played by early critics, or even perhaps a kind of “anxiety of influence.” What I wish to emphasize
127 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 255. 128 Fowler, 256. 47 is that, while literary genres are highly useful for critics and students of literature, for rhetorical classification we must look elsewhere.
Burke gives us a more useful approach to the “arbitrary” nature of classifying literary genres, one that complements Miller’s idea of rhetorical genre. Burke considers types of literature as “equipment for living,” “strategies”—or “attitudes”—for dealing with situations.129 Burke bases his rhetorical criticism, therefore, not on formal, critical differentia, but on the “genus” that derives from the “naming of the one situation.” The same strategy or attitude might, using the example Burke gives, inform both a sermon and a dirty joke.130 Burke’s “sociological” classification involves an “inspection of the lot,” an inductive method for uncovering the various strategies works of literature contain, and then only generalizing when it comes to the types of situations literature addresses. Thus, his sociological classification “would derive its relevance from the fact that it should apply both to works of art and to situations outside of art.”131
As Burke notes elsewhere,132 this is essentially an extension of an “Aristotelian” approach to the “dramatic” nature of lived experience and our strategies for dealing with it in competitive and cooperative acts. While Burke indeed considers literature as representational, which could be described in terms of an Aristotelian mimesis of action taking place outside of literature, he is equally fascinated with the particularities of poetic language, such as the kinesthetic or sensory imagery that affects the reader in a bodily or
129 Burke, “Equipment for Living,” 296. 130 Burke, 302. 131 Burke, 303. 132 Burke, “The Philosophy of Literary Form,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 74. 48 “biological” way, 133 or the role the poet plays as a modern, Gorgianic “medicine man,” offering “stylistic medicine” for “very real” situations.134 In other words, considering how poetry mirrors the tactics of social action means “starting from a concern with the various tactics and deployments involved in ritualistic acts of membership, purification, and opposition”—“dramatism” is only a synecdoche, or a “unifying hub,” for concerns that arise from Burke’s study of literature as symbolic action.135
A Burkean inductive study of the various strategies at work in the vast array of lyric discourse would involve a study of those strategies at work in the various epideictic subgenres of lyric and, more importantly, the attitudes and situations that mark them as ritualistic discourse. Such discourse would aim to provide the means to enact, by reference to the “the doxa of rhetorical culture,” what Thomas B. Farrell rightly terms “the primary rhetorical experience of what it means to be an audience”—a group of individuals going through the shared experience of what Burke calls collective “unburdening,” achieved though the “organizing” of the emotions by means of poetic logos.136
Lyric, then, may be characterized by what I am calling “epideictic performativity,” which I define as the ability of poet-rhetors to invent and perform, and invite their readers to re-perform, memorable discourse that constitutes a broad range of social actions. Such actions, in turn, respond to a range of typified situations—situations that require an
133 Burke, 36–37. 134 Burke, 64. 135 Burke, 124. 136 Thomas B. Farrell, “Aristotle’s Enthymeme as Tacit Reference,” in Rereading Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 99; Burke, “Philosophy of Literary Form,” 92. 49 articulation or rehearsal of speech that displays particular meanings or values that indicate that there exists a social unanimity or a stable or universal order the reader can refer back to for the purposes of psychological “unburdening.” The poet’s role here is to articulate a convincing, memorable, and repeatable version of this “reality.”
The above formulation is close to Walker’s argument that the lyric is a form of epideixis; lyric is, in other words, “public discourse about meaning and value” that is “made distinctive by its ritualistic elements.”137 Lyric is the literary critical name for a collection of rhetorical genres that have, over the centuries, sought to enact, to a much greater degree than is possible in narrative or drama, epideictic’s educative, ameliorative function. Its ritualistic elements simply allow the lyric greater access to the range of epideictic motives and situations.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca remark that, though epideictic seems “to have more in connection with literature than with argumentation,” epideictic’s true value lies in how the speaker establishes “a sense of communion centered around particular values recognized by the audience,” and that “to this end he uses the whole range of means available to the rhetorician for purposes of amplification and enhancement.”138 This amplification and enhancement, as shown above, is shared by both the poetry and rhetoric.
Lyric exhibits this function particularly well because it is the poetic art that, as Barbara
Hardy puts it, “thrives” on the “exclusion” of both ordinary experience and poetic fable.139
137 Walker, “View from Halicarnassus,” 20; Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 350. 138 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric, 51. 139 Barbara Hardy, The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 2. 50 In doing so, lyric “converts into universal values” that which has “acquired a certain standing through social unanimity.” As epideictic, it is “prone to appeal to a universal order, to a nature, or a god that would vouch for the unquestioned, and supposedly unquestionable, values. In epidictic oratory, the speaker turns educator.”140
The speaker-educator here, however, is not the pedagogue or critic. As effective social action, lyric discourse must be both memorable and repeatable, able to stick in one’s mind and be rehearsed, which the lyric accomplishes better than any other genre. It both excludes conventionally narrative mimesis and encompasses epideictic’s concern with the ritualistic, incantatory dimension of logos. To turn educator, in other words, the lyric poet—and, to some degree, the audience—must turn performer.
OVERVIEW OF THIS DISSERTATION This chapter has argued that the lyric, in its performative role, is best viewed as a type of social action. The lyric is performed, and it enacts the “ritualistic” occasions that define it as epideictic rhetoric. It can therefore be described rhetorically as a collection of generic strategies for dealing with these ritualistic situations. The genres of lyric, I have argued, are distinguished by a degree of “epideictic performativity,” or the ability of poet- rhetors who share in common certain values with their audiences to articulate these values in stylistically inventive, memorable performances. The audience can then use these articulations to strategically confirm, shape, or reshape their own beliefs in their own
140 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric, 51. 51 discourse.
The following chapters will demonstrate how, in the Renaissance, a performative poetics of this kind may be contrasted with a dominant, pedagogically inflected,
“paideutic” poetics. Paideutic poetics works according to the principles by which the
Renaissance theorizes and defends poetry, and consequently it views poetry as something akin to an Aristotelian tool of critical analysis meant to improve the judgmental and ethical faculties of Renaissance citizens.
To show this, in the next chapter I examine how Renaissance English poetic theory may be situated in these broad poetic traditions. Going back as far as Thomas Elyot’s Book
Named The Governor, as a propaedeutic to both rhetoric and moral philosophy, poetry was defended on the basis of how well it transmits values to young nobles and aristocrats, and was seen to instill both eloquence and ethical behavior in members of the governing class.
Elyot, therefore, decries both “rhetoricians” and “versifiers,” those who teach rhetoric or poetry only as crafts of discourse, rather than the proper arts of the “orators” and “poets.”
The stylistic elevation that has long connected poetry with formalized rhetoric, in Elyot and in later writers such as Sidney, is deemphasized, and poetics comes to view the ethical formation of the citizen as the primary goal of teaching poetry. Consequently, poetry comes to be emphasized as an opportunity for critical judgment rather than as an art of invention.
In its most developed form, paideutic poetics manifests in William Scott’s Model of Poesy, a recently discovered—and ingenious—Elizabethan treatise on poetics. Scott’s poetic theory was directly influenced by Sidney and was the first in England to make full use of Aristotle’s Poetics, conceiving poetry primarily as a dramatic, mimetic art. Scott 52 thinks of poetics not as productive art, a techne, but rather as a speculative, theoretical art, an art of episteme that rests on the development of a critical, analytical faculty.
In stark contrast to Scott’s poetics, George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy thinks of poetics as a productive art, able to inform both the composition of poetry and eloquent speech in general. Puttenham sees poetry as an epideictic art of display and poetics not as a theory of poetry so much as a craft of speaking well that is outlined in a practical handbook for courtiers and aristocrats.
In short, while English poetic theory developed and was innovated by those working within a paideutic paradigm, only focusing on paideutic poetics risks missing ways in which poetry, considered to be the kind of performative art Puttenham describes, was put to use. And it is in lyric specifically where these performative elements are most evident.
We can see these different approaches to poetry at work in the lyrics of George
Herbert and John Donne. While it has been claimed that both utilize epideictic in the narrower sense of the term,141 Donne having written both encomia and devotional poetry, and Herbert having gained his rightful reputation as the premier English devotional poet, both display rhetorical traits that indicate the ongoing divergence of performative and
141 See, for example, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Diana Benet, Secretary of Praise: The Poetic Vocation of George Herbert (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984); O. B. Hardison Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973). 53 paideutic poetics well into the seventeenth century.
In chapter three, I look to George Herbert’s Temple as evidence of the performative nature of the lyric, and I examine The Temple’s devotional contexts and its reception history. There has been a rich body of work done on how Herbert’s poetry relates to the public devotional traditions of the English Church. Ramie Targoff, in particular, has argued that Herbert intended The Temple to be a kind of addendum to the Book of Common Prayer, and that Herbert saw himself as a contemporary psalmist-liturgist who incorporated public devotional rhetoric in his poetry.142 I argue that as “scripts” for devotional utterance,
Herbert’s poems both enact and invite the performance of eloquent speech, not only confirming an audience’s values, but developing a devotional hexis, or religious character, through the acting out of devotional discourse. Herbert, in other words, is concerned about training his readership’s ethical-religious character, but the public situations for which he composed are fundamentally unlike those of the humanistic classroom.
I argue in chapter four that, while not writing for the schoolroom, Donne approaches poetry primarily as an analytical tool, which places him squarely in the paideutic tradition. It has been argued by Thomas O. Sloane that Donne owed much to humanist rhetoric, particularly his use of controversia and his forensic positioning of the reader as iudex, or “judge.”143 Donne, in brief, seems at first to confirm the “standard”
142 Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 85–117; “The Poetics of Common Prayer: George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Devotional Lyric,” English Literary Renaissance 29, no. 2 (1999): 468–90. 143 Thomas O. Sloane, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 164; see also “A Rhetorical Analysis of John Donne’s ‘The Prohibition,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 48, no. 1 (1962): 38–45. 54 Renaissance view of rhetoric as defined by controversy, or by the practices of agonistic disputation that arose out of the legal tradition and “sophistic” wrangling. However, I would add that, insofar as these forensic strategies also developed into interpretive principles that were used in classrooms,144 Donne is primarily concerned with exercising the reader’s judgment. He positions his poetry as a propaedeutic to greater knowledge in a sort of intellectual exercise or “game”—a social art of judgment—and uses rhetoric as an analytical tool derived from an Aristotelian rather than sophistic tradition.
144 See above, 17-19; and Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 55 Chapter Two: “Fitter to Please the Court Than the School”: Performative and Paideutic Rhetoric in Elizabethan Poetics
INTRODUCTION In the Defence of Poetry’s discussion of style, which examines what Sidney sees as the poor state of the English imitators of Cicero, Demosthenes, and others, Sidney compares clerks with courtiers, the latter, he notes, having “a more sound style than . . . some professors of learning.” The clerk reminds Sidney of a pedagogue who sets out to prove two eggs three and, though he might be “counted a sophister, had none for his labour.”1 The courtier, on the other hand, is “fittest to nature” because he hides his art, where the clerk
“flieth from nature, and indeed abuseth art.”2 One might conclude, then, that Sidney favors a poetics that is fundamentally unlike that found in the school. While Sidney does praise the realm of praxis and the rhetorical ability of poetry to sway the passions and to move one to action, his main preoccupation is with the dialectical, Platonic power of poetry’s “purifying the wit”—in short, its capacity to educate.3
In a brilliantly ambiguous way, Sidney’s Defence exemplifies two strains of rhetoric in Renaissance poetics: one is didactic and philosophical in the sense just mentioned, the other is essentially rhetorical and derived from English stylistics. The former kind of poetics
I have called “paideutic,” as it considers poetry an aid to pedagogy, the goal of which is the creation of virtuous citizens who are trained in ethical and literary judgment. To this I have
1 Sidney, “Defence of Poetry,” 118. 2 Sidney, 118–19. 3 Sidney, 82. 56 contrasted a performative poetics, which understands poetry as an art that provides and exemplifies the techniques necessary for eloquent verbal performance. Sidney identifies the controversy at the center of this divergence: whether poetry is to be defined primarily as an art that promotes Elizabethan standards of conduct and belief or as a technical art of discourse that uses figural language. Sidney’s criticism of indecorously “eloquent” poetry, for instance, indicts inferior poetry as a pedantic, belletristic, “flowery” effusion of learned eloquence. Yet his defense of poetry, because it is a defense, cannot stray too far from the school. A telling example of his scorn for the figures can be found in the following excerpt:
Truly I could wish, if at least I might be so bold to wish in a thing beyond the reach of my capacity, the diligent imitators of Tully and Demosthenes (most worthy to be imitated) did not so much keep Nizolian paper-books of their figures and phrases, as by attentive translation (as it were) devour them whole, and make them wholly theirs: for now they cast sugar and spice upon every dish that is served to the table— like those Indians, not content to wear earrings at the fit and natural place of the ears, but they will thrust jewels through their nose and lips, because they will be sure to be fine.4
Sidney’s is a view of poetic decorum that is derived from what we would today call institutional “criticism” rather than the practical handbook tradition of English stylistics— this is in itself an important innovation on his part. Like many intellectuals of his time,
Sidney sees the focus on “figures and phrases” a source of an empty Ciceronianism and a proliferation of eloquence devoid of content, which Thomas Elyot earlier in the century argued was nothing more than a kind of mimicry or birdsong, “sound without any purpose.”5
Sidney instead follows Plato’s suggestion in the Phaedrus, to consider a part of a speech in
4 Sidney, 117. 5 Elyot, Book Named The Governor, 45. 57 terms of the whole, and sees composition and interpretation on similar terms according to the holistic principle of oeconomia. His is a view of poetry that is not pedantic, but, at its core, it is not rhetorical either.
Sidney’s idea of decorum, for example, is not so much the rhetorical strategy of accommodating a speech to an audience as it is a means of accommodating a speech to a universal principle6—any kind of beautiful speech, for Sidney, is a function of these universal principles. The poet is not beholden to the rule-governed art of rhetoric, and does not simply imitate the tropes, figures, and schemes of ancient authors and orators. However, since Sidney sees poetry’s end as being philosophical and moral instruction, the terms that the Defence uses to justify poetry derive primarily from the grammatical tradition, which is
“based on the institutionalization of poetry, or of ‘literature’ in general, as a school subject and an object of philological and hermeneutic study.”7 Close attention to the rhetorical figures, without considering the economy of poetry and philosophy, leads to poetry growing
“all riotous through pleasure unalloyed,” as Plutarch puts it. Or, as Plato would have it, without philosophy’s governance, poetry is dangerous for both soul and state. And this view of poetic decorum, it should be noted, serves a practical, pedagogical aim: without being guided by a teacher, young students might simply find an unfamiliar or ancient text baffling or cryptic.
There exists, however, another approach to rhetoric in in Elizabethan poetics that I would like to put forward as a viable alternative to Sidney’s paideutic, essentially
6 Plato, Phaedrus 264c; Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 20–40. 7 Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, 328. 58 hermeneutic poetics—one articulated by George Puttenham in his Art of English Poesy.
Puttenham wrote for courtiers and courtier poets, and sees poetry in terms of how it functions as a practical, discursive art. The importance of Puttenham, I argue, is that he outlines how poetics relates to artistic discourse in a broader sense, foregrounding style— the figures, in particular—as the central, functional mechanism of both poetic and other forms of improvisatory, occasional discourse. In his third book on elocutio, Puttenham makes poetry look less like an institutional artifact and more like a public, rhetorical art— poiesis is in fact a kind of metaphorical through line in the Art for the malleable rhetorical self. Where Sidney praises courtiers for their eloquence, Puttenham provides a means of achieving it.
Puttenham, then, is a useful contrast to the dominant poetic theory in the
Renaissance, which, to risk oversimplifying a vast and important area of study, sees poetry as fundamentally didactic, or, in the Aristotelian tradition of poetic analysis, an object to theorize. This paideutic approach to rhetoric and poetics derives its utility from its function in academic or educational contexts and emphasizes genres of poetry or prose that can more easily be mined for ethical and philosophical truths. When such truths are recognized by the student, the result is more like Platonic recollection than persuasion: those who recognize the truth of poetry are those who already understand, by way of instruction, what to look for.8 Puttenham, on the other hand, constructs a poetics that foregrounds the performative aspects of poetry that are less useful in didactic settings but that have tangible advantages
8 Walker, 285. 59 for speakers and writers who require verbal adaptability to suit their direct engagement with audiences.
Puttenham is therefore useful for how we understand the relationship between rhetoric and poetics in the Renaissance. He recognizes that rhetorical figures are a crucial source of the improvisatory and affective power of both poetry and rhetoric, and he makes use of them in a way that is fundamentally different than other Elizabethan theorists.
With a few notable exceptions,9 the figures have been unenthusiastically received in modern scholarship, and Puttenham has been accused of being hampered by them. In his excellent treatment of Renaissance literary rhetoric, Neil Rhodes observes that, while
“[c]ritical sophistication in this period comes in the form of rhetorical analysis,” and while
“we can be impressed by the technical acumen” demonstrated by the Renaissance scholar’s fluency in recognizing the figures in a given piece of literature, “it is more difficult for us to feel the same kind of enthusiasm for such verbal effects.”10 “The Elizabethans,” according to Gavin Alexander, “often missed the point of poetics because of their love of rhetoric.”11 In other words, to English stylistics, which is more concerned with verbal performance, we may oppose an art of poetry that emphasizes its educative capacity, where the “point of poetics” is the ethical and literary critical principles imparted to Elizabethan
9 See Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 10 Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), vii. 11 William Scott, The Model of Poesy, ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), lxix. 60 gentlemen or gentlemen in training.
The paideutic approach to poetry is most brilliantly exemplified in England by
William Scott. His Model of Poesy, discovered in 2003, is the most comprehensive English poetics we yet have. The Model is a stunning intellectual achievement: it offers an unusually attentive reading of Aristotle combined with an elegant synthesis of continental poetics—the whole of which is heavily indebted to, though never dominated by, Sidney.
Scott is a natural foil for Puttenham: he was an established and upstanding gentleman who composed the Model as a law student; Puttenham was a rake, a criminal, and a generation older than Scott, composing the last sections of the Art towards the end of a life spent on the run.
Compared with the Model, Puttenham’s Art can seem at first rather quaint—its use of figures evidence that Puttenham was overly concerned with microscopic issues of style.
However, that Puttenham failed to accomplish what Scott later did is to assume that
Puttenham failed to articulate a theory he likely felt no need to articulate. Puttenham is quite successful if we view his achievement on its own terms, not so much a theory of poetry as a handbook for aristocrats. Puttenham even translates his list of figures into
English so that his treatise does not seem “a work more fit for clerks than for courtiers.”12
The Art, to put it simply, is a poetics of a fundamentally different type than the
Model. It takes a standard Renaissance stylistic paradigm derived from rhetorical handbooks, which conceive style primarily in terms of the figures, and refashions it as
12 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 242. 61 courtly discourse: the figures that constitute the basis of eloquent writing are treated also as the basis of eloquent verbal performance at court. In the following pages, I look at how a rhetorical, performative, or “courtly” poetics stands at odds with a paideutic poetics that in England can be traced at least as far back as Elyot’s educational treatise, The Book
Named The Governor. This poetics was next articulated by Sidney in his Defence, and then most brilliantly and in its most fully realized form in Scott’s Model.
These divergent trends in Renaissance poetic theory echo an ancient distinction that resulted in two competing views concerning the rhetorical nature of poetry. One sees poetry as a techne, as productive knowledge constituting an art of situational discourse. The other sees poetry as episteme, or speculative knowledge, where poetry exists as an object of interpretation, and where the poet’s role is to craft fictional characters and plots that communicate universal ethical and philosophical principles. The latter sees “mere” eloquence as evidence of a deficit of learning, not able to do much on its own. How the
Renaissance recapitulates ancient controversies concerning the ethical status and aims of artistic discourse therefore has a direct bearing on the dissimilarity between the theory and practice of rhetoric and poetics in the Renaissance. My hope is that an examination of the authors who exemplify this richly agonistic history in England will demonstrate that the perceived need to defend poetry in terms not its own in fact obscures its place in the history of the sister discipline of which it has always been a part.
THOMAS ELYOT ON RHETORICIANS AND VERSIFIERS Thomas Elyot, Tudor educational theorist and early proponent of English
62 humanism, in his Book Named The Governor articulates both the ideological justification for what has come to be called “Tudor despotism” and the role humanist education plays in rearing future statesmen. Training in the right use of the English tongue, unsurprisingly, plays a major role, and Elyot leads by example—Elyot’s treatise is an early major prose work in English. The Governor was in print for over a century, influencing English rhetorical and poetic theory as well as courtesy literature.13
Elyot was the first English theorist to distinguish between the function of poetry and that of rhetoric, and the first to give poetry a primary position in a system of education.14 In a few pages early in the first book, Elyot outlines how a young aristocrat ought to study poetry, and justifies his procedure by alluding to ancient precedent. About
Homer and Virgil, Elyot writes:
[Virgil] may be interlaced with the lesson of Odyssey of Homer, wherein is declared the wonderful prudence and fortitude of Ulysses in his passage from Troy. And if the child were induced to make verses by the imitation of Virgil and Homer, it should minister to him much delectation and courage to study; ne the making of verses is not discommended in a nobleman, since the noble Augustus and almost all the old emperors made books in verses.15
Elyot here exemplifies what Marjorie Curry Woods has called the “humanist metamorphosis of the lowest of the liberal arts, grammar as textual analysis, into a higher study with specifically classical echoes.”16 It was hoped that these texts would impart to
13 For Elyot’s rhetorical moves, or “tropes,” emulated by later courtesy manuals, see Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117–20. 14 Theodore Stenberg, “Sir Thomas Elyot’s Defense of the Poets,” Studies in English, no. 6 (1926): 121. 15 Elyot, Book Named The Governor, 32. 16 Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 120. 63 the student the “prudence and fortitude” of Aeneas or Ulysses. Virtue and universal ethical principles are encoded in Homeric or Virgilian poetic examples, which the student discerns by reencoding them in his own imitations. Without such directed study, the student would succumb to poetry’s false appearances, which are both enticing and dangerous. Bernard
Weinberg explains:
Others are quite capable of resisting, and hence are out of danger—mature and adult persons already formed by sound education, the sages of the city who have extraordinary faculties of discrimination, all those men who are morally disposed to goodness and virtue. The differentiating factor here is intelligence; the young and the ignorant cannot understand the true meanings of poetry and are led astray by its false appearances, whereas the old and the wise pierce beneath the illusory surface to the salutary teachings contained within. This involves a third assumption, that all poetry—even the comedies of Terence—is essentially allegorical in character, that what is visible to the eye and audible to the ear is but an imperfect representation of hidden truth perceptible only by the intellect.17
Since rules and precepts demand that art ought to be governed by a standard of verisimilitude, poetry is seen to function mimetically and allegorically. Elyot thus indicts those who “make verses expressing thereby none other learning but the craft of versifying” and who therefore “be not of ancient writers named poets, but only called versifiers.”18 In
Elyot’s mind, if a poet conceives poetry as skill in versifying, he will mistake a rule (the means) for a principle (the end)—a principle supplied, in this case, by the discipline of moral philosophy.
Here we can see one reason why poetry comes to be considered wholly distinct from rhetoric, namely its utility in teaching and its ability to illustrate the aims of humanist
17 Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, 1.295. 18 Elyot, Book Named The Governor, 46. 64 instruction. The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, for instance, laments in his De causis corruptarum artium that “[t]he moderns confound the arts by reason of their resemblance, and of two that are very much opposed to each other make a single art. They call rhetoric grammar, and grammar rhetoric, because both treat of language. The poet they call orator, and the orator poet, because both put eloquence and harmony into their discourses.”19
Grammatical instruction—textual analysis and imitation—is not rhetoric, which comes as no surprise. Poetry, however, as a medium central to textual analysis, becomes of crucial importance due to the requirements of an increasingly nuanced and complex method of analyzing texts advanced by humanists. The analysis of poetry is not just a compositional exercise but also a propaedeutic to moral philosophy and dialectical reasoning—in a sense, it is a training of the entire self. To use Arthur F. Kinney’s phrase, poetry is “at once inductive and deductive”: it does not teach rhetoric, but rather uses rhetorical embellishment to stimulate aesthetic pleasure, which is what induces young students to study discourse that is, at its most basic level, dialectical.20
Rhetorical embellishment in general, then, must serve some greater educative purpose. Elyot therefore criticizes “rhetoricians” who are not proper orators because they have no cognizance of the other “sciences” the student will later be taught:
Also they which do teach rhetoric, which is the science whereby is taught an artificial form of speaking, wherein is the power to persuade, move, and delight, or by that science only do speak or write, without any adminiculation [support] of other sciences, ought to be named rhetoricians, declamators, artificial speakers
19 Juan Luis Vives, Opera Omnia, ed. Gregorio Mayans y Síscar (Valencia, 1785), 64. Quoted in Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 312–13. 20 Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 36. 65 (named in Greek Logodedali21), or any other name than orators.22
Elyot’s concern with how the various arts provide “adminiculation,” or support, for one another betrays a hierarchy that places any kind of baser productive art—any techne— below the higher “arts,” which are forms of episteme. As instructional tools, rhetoric and poetry must serve a dual purpose: to provide students with examples of technical achievement in speaking and writing and to illustrate subject matter that is ethically or philosophically appropriate.
Other productive arts, such as painting and carving, are suitable for a young aristocrat because they train the judgment to first discern and then to convey accurately the examples of virtue and courage contained in a given ancient text:
And he that is instructed in portraiture and happeneth to read any noble and excellent history, whereby his courage is inflamed to the imitation of virtue, he forthwith taketh his pen or pencil, and with a grave and substantial study, endeavoreth himself to express lively and (as I might say) actually in portraiture, not only the fact or affair, but also the sundry affections of every personage in the history recited, which might in any wise appear or be perceived in their visage, countenance, or gesture.23
The procedure is familiar: painting is a method of analysis similar to that seen in humanistic paideia—an enticement to virtue and a training of the intellect for more important things.
It has to be, lest the boy’s master “make of a prince or nobleman’s son a common painter or carver.”24 A rhetorician or a versifier, being a mere “maker,” is both an intellectual and
21 Elyot’s use of “logodaedaly” predates the earliest entry in the OED. I assume he is referring to Phaedrus 266e, where Socrates calls Theodorus a “word-wizard” (logodaidalos). 22 Elyot, Book Named The Governor, 46. 23 Elyot, 24–25. 24 Elyot, 25. 66 social inferior.
Elyot, to summarize, first poses in The Governor that poetry ought to be defined by, and defended in terms of, its role as educative tool of textual analysis. Sidney will later rearticulate this conception of poetry in his Defence, and Scott will transform it into a fully elaborated theory of poetry—Scott redefines poetic making in order to treat it as a properly
Aristotelian, analytical “instrument of reason.” In a manner similar to Aristotle’s treatments of rhetoric and poetics, Scott’s Model examines poetry not to produce poets, but rather to impart to readers the analytical, critical faculty of discerning what makes a text “poetic” or not—Scott’s goal, that is, is to produce critics. What makes a text poetic, and thus defensible, to Renaissance audiences, however, is first outlined by Sidney.
SIDNEY’S DEFENCE OF POETRY Though a “Sidnean” theory of poetry will be left for Scott to write, Sidney does make several theoretical gestures, important to note here, from which to mount his exceptionally well-crafted defense. Sidney distinguishes between knowledge unassisted by poetic eloquence and knowledge in the hands of the poet, who recognizes that to move
(movere) is superior to mere teaching (docere), and that moving a student to learn means taking advantage of a student’s desire for knowledge and his capacity to take pleasure in the act of learning. According to Sidney, movere is “both the cause and effect of teaching,” in that it moves one to take to heart moral precepts and emulate moral examples.25
Sidney argues that the poet assimilates and transcends the “disputative virtue” of
25 Sidney, “Defence of Poetry,” 91. 67 the moral philosopher, as well as the historian’s depiction of the active life in his “mouse- eaten records.”26 With his command of both eloquence and an imitative capacity to “figure forth” didactic examples, only the poet can square the realms of praxis and gnosis. He achieves this by providing examples of virtuous and heroic action that represent symbolically the timeless principles found in the “dangerless academy of Plato.”27
It is no surprise, then, that Sidney argues that poetry is mimetic fiction, and that it should represent action according to the naturalistic principles of probability and necessity, citing Aristotle. He agrees with Horace that poetry should both teach and delight. Finally, he cites the Horatian dictum of ut pictura poesis, that poetry should work like a speaking picture, in the sense that it is both a stand-in for the author and should vividly appeal to the eye (enargeia) and to the mind (energeia). As is the case with most Renaissance rhetorical and poetic treatises since Erasmus’ De copia, Sidney takes pains to separate content from form, res from verba. He does so in order to classify (in a very brief, polemical section) the genres of poetry—the different types of mimesis—to “see what faults may be found in the right use of them.”28 This will be the section expounded by Scott in The Model, but it is worth noting here because it occurs at almost exactly the place where Sidney argues that versification is “no cause to poetry,” again echoing the Poetics.29
Sidney’s interpretation of Aristotelian imitation is unusually strict, to a degree
26 Sidney, 83. 27 Sidney, 83. 28 Sidney, 94. 29 Sidney, 81; Aristotle, Poetics 1447b: “it is the way with people to tack on ‘poet’ to the name of a metre, and talk of elegiac-poets and epic-poets, thinking they call them poets not by reason of the imitative nature of their work, but indiscriminately by reason of the metre they write in.” 68 uncommon in the Renaissance.30 While the pejorative “verser” or “versifier” is often applied to “lesser poets,” as we see in Elyot, composing in verse is more often than not considered a requisite feature of poiesis. Vives, in his chapter on the division of the arts of in the De tradendis disciplinis, for instance, defines poetry in part by the rhymical attributes it shares with music: “[t]o all the arts is added Music, as a relaxation and recreation of the mind, through the harmony of sounds. Under this head, comes all poetry, which consists in the harmony of numbers.”31 Later, when discussing energeia, Vives calls poetry the
“melody of the soul.”32 And while Scaliger acknowledges that imitation is the “basis of all poetry,” he soon after notes that imitation “is not the end of poetry, but is intermediate to the end.”33
As we have seen, since Sidney’s poet has free range over both the general rule and the particular example, he supersedes both the philosopher and the historian.34 While the poet may not be a prophet, he is a “maker,” free to range “only within the zodiac of his own wit.” He is able to “figure forth” examples better than those found in history, and therefore illustrate natural principles and moral doctrine better than the philosopher. Thus
“for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in someone by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with
30 For a discussion of Sidney’s strictness on this point, see Gavin Alexander’s introduction to Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy,” lviii–lix. 31 Vives, Vives: On Education: A Translation of the De tradendis disciplinis of Juan Luis Vives, trans. Foster Watson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 40. 32 Vives, 126. 33 Julius Caesar Scaliger, Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics, trans. Frederick Morgan Padelford (New York: Holt, 1905), 2. 34 Sidney makes use of Poetics 1451b1 here: “poesy dealeth with katholou, that is to say, with the universal consideration, and the history with kathekaston, the particular.” “Defence of Poetry,” 87–8. 69 the particular example.”35 Versifying is merely a delight, and “no cause” to this imitative process.
Poets, then, are semi-divine makers, likenesses of the “heavenly Maker of that maker,” limited only by an “infected will.”36 Like God, they are concerned with making things. In the following section, Sidney argues for Aristotelian mimesis of res rather than verba so that he can justify poetry according to how well it emulates this divine action.37
Those who judge poetry can do so not just by how much they are moved, but also according to how well this “formal intention,” as Walker puts it, is carried out: “skill” is defined here as the ability of the poet to invent a “fore-conceit” represented by language. This is
Sidney’s brilliant reformulation of earlier ideas concerning imitation’s role in the grammatical tradition. In pedagogical contexts from antiquity to the Renaissance, the
“audience still is judging, but they are not so much responding to the poet’s persuasion as deciding what katholou [general principle] the poem’s mimêsis signifies and whether it is well done.”38 Poetry that explicitly calls attention to its own eloquence or wit, on the other hand, which is “apparelled, or rather disguised, in a courtesan-like painted affectation,” is
35 Sidney, 85. 36 Sidney, 79. 37 Michael Mack refers to this as a Thomistic “analogical expression” of divine creativity: “Still, there is yet another understanding of human creativity, which is to admit the possibility not only that human and divine creativity exist but also that there is a real relationship between them. This approach, which happens to be that of Sidney, treats human creativity not as a metaphorical but as an analogical expression. The relationship of divine creativity and human making, according to this understanding, is discovered, not devised.” Sidney’s Poetics: Imitating Creation (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 189. 38 Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, 287. 70 verbally whorish in Sidney’s mind, sensuous yet insincere.39
PAIDEUTIC POETICS: SCOTT’S MODEL OF POESY The discovery in 2003 of Scott’s poetic treatise, The Model of Poesy (1599), has the potential to be a watershed in the study of Renaissance poetics. It expands Sidney’s
Defence into the most comprehensive existing Elizabethan poetics we have,40 a synthetic treatment of Renaissance theories of style and Aristotelian formalism.
Scott, like Sidney, by all accounts was an accomplished scholar and citizen. There is evidence that The Model of Poesy, written while Scott was a law student, gained Scott patronage from its dedicatee, Sir Henry Lee, a kinsman of Queen Elizabeth. Scott served as a Member of Parliament in 1601 for New Woodstock, a borough for which Lee acted as steward.41 Scott was also connected to another prominent family by marriage: Sir Thomas
Smythe married Elizabeth Scott, the sister of Scott’s cousin. Not long after this marriage,
Scott accompanied Smythe on a special embassy to Russia in 1604. It was during this special embassy that Scott possibly authored an anonymous account of the turbulent period after the death of Ivan the Terrible, “Sir Thomas Smithes voiage and entertainment in
Rushia,” a major source for John Milton’s A brief history of Moscovia. This text might in fact be the “discourse” promised by Scott in his only surviving letter, to Robert Cecil, King
James’s secretary of state, as it bears a striking resemblance to that proposed document.42
Scott’s only other existing work is a translation, incomplete and damaged, of Guillaume de
39 Sidney, “Defence of Poetry,” 117. 40 Scott, Model of Poesy, lxix. 41 Scott, xx–xxi. 42 Scott, xxii. 71 Salluste Du Bartas’s La sepmaine, a poem about the creation of the world and—quite appropriate for a treatise on poetics—God’s divine poiesis. By the end of his life he had established a reputation as a respected scholar and translator. What little we know of Scott’s final years places him in Kent, with the Sidneys, the Smythes, and the Wyatts, where he died (c. 1617), presumably a distinguished member of that literary and cultural elite.
Sidney’s Defence is The Model’s point of departure. Scott makes full use of the ut pictura poesis trope and, characteristic for the period, uses this trope to align his poetics with Aristotelian mimesis. Scott goes even further than Sidney in his explanation of the analogy of poetry and painterly representation, however: “the one counterfeits the sundry motions and inward affections in the outward forms of behavior and countenance (the mind’s glasses), the other pictures the same person’s mind and manners in the delivering of his life and actions.”43 Scott is unsatisfied with merely comparing poetry with painting: he wants to know what distinguishes poetry from its sister arts. So that “the definition of the thing may be better understood and allowed,” Scott logically subdivides the
“discipline” of poetry into the three predicables of genus (an art of imitation), difference
(imitation using elocutio), and end (to teach and to delight in order to move to virtuous action).
The genus to which poetry belongs, an art of imitation, is a techne understood as an
Aristotelian “instrument of reason.” Unsurprisingly, Scott takes particular pains to explain poetry’s difference from craftmanship, not wanting to incur the wrath of those who might
43 Scott, 6. 72 accuse him of allowing poetry to “sit with the meanest of handmaids”:
And all this they say (truly) not unreasonably, as they mince the compass of this term art, restraining it to be only conversant about things material and workable, as are the servile handicrafts of clothing, building, and the rest. But we shall easily and fully agree, if by art with us (as with Aristotle and the stream that follow him in calling it so) in a looser sense they understand a frame and a body of rules compacted and digested by reason out of observation and experience, behoveful to some particular good end in our civil life.44
Gnosis involves praxis, as is the case with Sidney, and the poetic maker uses his techne as an instrument for discovering the best way, as Sidney puts it, to feign a Cyrus to produce many Cyruses for the good of society.45
Effective poetry depends, in short, upon the analytical faculty described in the
Rhetoric: “for it is possible to observe the cause why some succeed by habit and others accidentally, and all would at once agree that such observation is the activity of an art.” As an art of observation, rhetoric enables one to derive from experience examples of success, which can then be conceptualized in “a reasoned habit of mind” when making something.46
Not only does The Model describe the “speaking picture of poesy,” it is itself a kind of speaking picture, a mimesis of Scott’s own conceptualization of his art. “Model,” therefore, refers to a likeness, an architectural or structural plan (his treatise is a metaphorical “house of poetry”), or an example to be imitated.47 He sees poetry as an object of theoretical
44 Scott, 7. 45 As Alexander notes, Scott leaves out Aristotle’s discussion of phronesis found in his definition of techne in the Nichomachean Ethics. There is a substantial lacuna in middle of the text, presumably describing the nature of virtue, and poetic phronesis could very well have been explained in the missing portion of the text. See Scott, 96 n.7.10-14. See also Aristotle’s definition of art as a “state concerned with making, involving a true course of reasoning,” in Nichomachean Ethics 1140a. 46 Aristotle, Rhetoric 1354a2; Nichomachean Ethics 1140a4. 47 Scott, Model of Poesy, 85 n.1.1. 73 reflection, and the skill that lies in observing what makes poetry function well works analogously to the skill (natural or taught) involved in artful composition—one needs to know the proper, virtuous, and efficacious rules that will allow one to construct an object that will move the audience to take delight in and heed moral instruction. Scott’s poetics is rhetorical, in short, because it is an art of observation. A poet who is merely skillful, in this sense, is similar to the titular character of the Gorgias, who in Plato’s dialogue comes up short because he is unable to conceptualize his art.48
Vives, whom Scott cites elsewhere in the Model, sees art in terms of means and ends, and makes a distinction between the ends of art and the ends of the artist (echoing the discussion of art in the Metaphysics):
The practicing of an art is nothing but the carrying out of its precepts; that indeed is the part of the pursuer of an art, and the precepts are his instruments rather than those of the art itself. The end of the artificer is the carrying out of its precepts…. Thus that which is for the art itself only the means, viz. the precepts, is, for the practiser of the art, the end, and for this cause neither art nor artist can be deprived of their separate ends.49
The end of poetic art—what will be the consequence of the artist’s actions—is the commendation of virtue and the censuring of vice, but this end is dependent on certain rules being followed in order to construct an object that adequately represents examples of each. The skill of the poetic artificer, in other words, lies in crafting a picture that speaks
48 Plato, Gorgias 449b; see also Kennedy’s discussion of Aristotle’s position on sophistry in Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 294. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 294. 49 Vives, On Education, 24. 74 well enough in place of the author to carry out this end.
This theoretical background informs Scott’s discussion of beauty. He borrows from
Scaliger the four qualities of poetic composition (proportion, sweetness, variety, and energeia). While Sidney argues that poetry is a mimesis of character, Scott argues that poetry imitates action. As we will see below, this gives Scott the terminological freedom he needs to integrate ut pictura poesis with the Poetics. Regarding sweetness, he says the following:
The third virtue is sweetness, which I take to consist principally in those apt conceits and fairly-shaped images taken in the mind of the poet and shadowed in the style, for I am of Aristotle’s opinion, who thinks those pictures that have no conceits or creature resembled by them but are only a flourish of exquisite colours disposed to please the sight are nothing so delightful as those images which, though they be but lineated in white, yet give the representation of some known creature or story.50
Scott modifies Aristotle’s point that random colors are less satisfying than the mere
“outline” of a dramatic plot, and by doing so argues that the versifier’s ordered “colors” are inferior to the idea behind a fictional story, which is its true source of beauty. Poets, according to Scott, “far outstrip” the orator’s ability to argue with “efficacy” (i.e., energeia) and, citing Quintilian, to make “evident” (i.e., evidentia or enargeia) that which arouses the admiration of an audience. The sweetness of res, that is, is far more potent than the sweetness of verba. Style is in fact understood by Scott as a kind of microcosm of plot.
Scott’s, like Sidney’s, is a “grammatical” conception of style. Though Scott later says that style is the “greatest grace and glory of the poet,” he also insists that poets “should consider that words are invented for the thing’s sake and that they are of no worth nor
50 Scott, Model of Poesy, 38. 75 estimation farther than as they serve to express our conceits.”51 He emphasizes the superiority of conceits and plots to such a degree that each stylistic virtue (proportion, variety, sweetness, energeia) can potentially describe dramatic or narrative form. In Scott’s mind, style can refer to virtues of good versing or good plotting: syntactic variation (figures of diction), an intended effect (figures of thought), or semantic deviation (tropes) can all be considered in terms of, for example, peripeteia:
Of these conceits most acceptable are those that are most nicely drawn and, as it were, beyond expectation. Such are those pretty turnings of your sentences from the apparent bent of your phrase that are, as it were, models of peripateiae—they are called facetiae, sales, and lepores, merry graceful and savoury jests—which arise of the pleasantness and urbanity of our nature and of the occasion administered in the matter.52
Like Scott’s “model of poesy,” certain figures or tropes are “models,” or imitations at a different formal register, of dramatic “turns.”53 The Model’s stylistics is, in short, a comprehensive account of narrative and dramatic poetics suited for conceiving how poetic language relates analogously to mimesis at different levels of poetic structure. This leads to ingenious insights about narrative and dramatic poetry, but, as is the case with Sidney, also leads to Scott’s disregard of the less mimetic genres of poetry like lyric.
Scott refashions Aristotle’s techne—an “instrument of reason”—into a “model” that represents poetry theoretically. That is, in his aim to define what exactly sets poetry apart from other arts, he describes poetry as a techne according to the Sidnean philosophical
51 Scott, 46–7. 52 Scott, 40. 53 In his introduction, Alexander speculates that Scott’s idea of the “possibility of analogy between different levels of poetic structure” is derived from Sidney’s Arcadia, where Sidney often compares “some sequence of events, thought, moral position, even gesture, to the structure of a sentence.” Scott, liii. 76 principles that justify its existence. Scott successfully and brilliantly conflates Aristotle with Horace’s ut pictura poesis dictum in a way that accords with the humanist emphasis on speculative knowledge, on episteme. The grammatical, paideutic paradigm that Scott works within leads him to appeal to poetic differentia that divorce poetics from its status as a techne proper, as a “merely” productive art.54 Rather than a techne for performers,
Scott’s is an art of analysis, much more useful in the schoolroom (or for impressing well- educated readers, such as The Model’s dedicatee), or wherever there exists a need for textual analysis.
PERFORMATIVE POETICS: PUTTENHAM’S ART OF ENGLISH POESY Many critics have been unkind to Puttenham—and deservedly so. His life was marked by debased criminality, violence (including rape), and legal wrangling. Frank
Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn give the following succinct description:
[Puttenham] was repeatedly assaulted (suffering murder attempts four times, he claims), sued, countersued, arrested, imprisoned (at least six times), kidnapped, and excommunicated (four times). He was sued for assaulting a parson in his church, and was charged with subornation of murder and with treason (though he was eventually cleared), and with several varieties of what we would now call sexual predation…. Although it was a litigious and violent age, Puttenham’s habits of life were extraordinarily unruly.55
Unsurprisingly, his Art of English Poesy, published in 1589, was not a success, with only one anonymous edition being printed (neither of the Art’s dedicatees, William Cecil, Lord
54 Janet M. Atwill has argued that Aristotle’s rhetorical techne harkens back to an Isocratean logon techne, and that this fact was obscured by the dual emphasis on theory and practice in Renaissance humanist pedagogy, which sees knowledge as timeless and universal rather than contextual or “professional.” See Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 1–3. 55 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 7. 77 Burghley and Queen Elizabeth, rewarded Puttenham for his labor).56
It is clear that Puttenham was certainly not the ideal courtier-poet he advertises in the Art, as Steven W. May has persuasively argued.57 Though Puttenham mentions that he was a guest at foreign courts in his youth, a claim we have no reason to doubt, he was effectively an outcast from English society by the time he finished the Art. We could posit that Puttenham wrote the Art as a delusional means to reenter courtly society; alongside his desperate genuflections to Elizabeth we find descriptions of poetry as an art of ethical refashioning, an art able to put a malleable mentis character, the author’s “mark of the mind,” on display. In any case, it is this latter point that makes the Art the distinctive artifact that it is—and it might simply be due to his idiosyncratic, syncretic approach to poetics, rhetoric, and Renaissance courtship.
And syncretic is perhaps the best descriptor of the Art. In contrast to Scott,
Puttenham provides his reader with the means for adapting to the court a comprehensive set of verbal skills, a project in which rhetoric, poetry, and courtly conduct interpenetrate to a degree unseen in other rhetoric manuals, poetics, or courtesy books. Puttenham and
Scott both share much in common with Renaissance poetics broadly speaking: they seek to comprehensively describe what poetry is, examine how it functions, and aim to provide rules and models so that vernacular poets might achieve literary feats on par with the
56 It was not completely ignored, however; Ben Jonson owned and annotated a copy. See Steven W. May, “Puttenham, George (1529-1590/91),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi-org./10.1093/ref:odnb/22913. 57 May, “George Puttenham’s Lewd and Illicit Career,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50, no. 2 (2008): 143–76; “Puttenham, George (1529-1590/91).” 78 ancients.58 Aristotle’s poetic theory had a considerable impact on both authors, though less so on Puttenham; he probably obtained it indirectly via Scaliger,59 whereas Scott clearly had access to the Aristotle’s text (most likely Alessandro de’ Pazzi’s 1536 Greek-Latin edition).60 There is no evidence that Puttenham read Sidney’s Defence and, since the
Defence was published after Sidney’s death in 1595 and Puttenham’s in 1591, there is little reason to believe he had. Though the Art shares a great many of the Defence’s basic assumptions, it is perhaps to Puttenham’s advantage that he composed a pre-Sidnean poetics. Puttenham’s discussion of the figures in his massive and brilliant third book, “Of
Ornament,” warrants most of our attention here, as the figures for Puttenham yield a poetic art—not so much a theory as a conglomeration of pieces of advice, anecdotes, and explanations of figures that are shown to deviate from and “abuse” ordinary language— fundamentally unlike the more idealized, speculative visions of poetry found in Sidney’s
Defence and Scott’s Model.
The importance of the rhetorical figures in the Renaissance cannot be overstated.
They were, in fact, the primary means by which the classical rhetorical tradition was understood and revivified.61 Erasmus’ De copia adapted the Ciceronian distinction between res and verba and applied it to written discourse, which provided grounds for the
58 Comprehensive accounts of Puttenham’s and Scott’s use of Renaissance poetic theory can be found in Scott, The Model of Poesy, xxxviii–liv; and Wayne A. Rebhorn, “‘His Tail at Commandment’’: George Puttenham and the Carnivalization of Rhetoric,” in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 43–49. 59 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 45. 60 Scott, Model of Poesy, xxxviii; Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, 1.361-73. 61 See the introduction to Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber, eds., Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–14. 79 later rhetorical distinction between the domains of language and thought. Later treatments of rhetoric use the figures to more fully describe this difference, and they amplify the treatments of the figures found primarily in Quintilian and in the Rhetorica ad Herennium.
Peter Mack observes that the goal of English style manuals was to “extend the usefulness of humanist education outside the circle of Latin learning.”62 This is, in effect, what
Puttenham is doing: he emphasizes the usefulness of the figures for a courtly, non-scholarly audience—and he takes pains to identify this audience explicitly, advertising the Art as
“fitter to please the court than the school.”63
Describing how poetic figuration derives and deviates from normal speech also allows Puttenham to evoke the immediate context of reception. In a concluding chapter he observes “that all your figures poetical or rhetorical are but observations of strange speeches and such as without any art at all we should use, and commonly do, even by very nature without any discipline.”64 Katherine R. Craik argues that these “strange speeches,” or deviations from common use, emphasize the “material presence” of the written text, while Brian Vickers claims that figures simulate in written style the semantic and syntactic variety of the spoken word.65 Both show how Puttenham’s account of language as a written representation of speech calls attention to itself; what I see happening also is Puttenham
62 Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 80. 63 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 243. 64 Puttenham, 377–78. 65 Katharine A. Craik, “‘The Material Point of Poesy’: Reading, Writing and Sensation in Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie,” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd- Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 157; Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 304–5; Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 90–91. 80 using a rhetorical paradigm found in the English style manuals—the various manuals that
Peter Mack argues make up the “single archetext” of English stylistics66—in a way that conceptualizes poetry as means of eloquent verbal performance.
We can see this emphasis on the performative aspect of poetics in Puttenham’s rationale for classifying the figures. He explains figures in terms of their effects on the ear
(enargeia) as well as on the mind (energeia):
This ornament then is of two sorts: one to satisfy and delight the ear only by a good outward show set upon the matter with words and speeches smoothly and tunably running; another by certain intendments or sense of such words and speeches inwardly working a stir to the mind. That first quality the Greeks called enargeia, of this word argos, because it giveth a glorious luster and light. This latter they called energeia of ergon, because it wrought with a strong and virtuous operation.67
Figures, according to Puttenham, “breedeth them both,” some using enargeia to affect the ear, some using energeia to affect the mind.68 Puttenham calls the former “auricular” figures, the latter “sensable” figures, and those that affect both the ear and the mind
“sententious” figures.69
Puttenham’s focus on “auricular” figures is either the result of a confused reading of classical theory or an idiosyncratic interpretation of enargeia. In ancient criticism, enargeia refers to vivid ornamentation that appeals to the eye, not the ear. While many have pointed out Puttenham’s confusion on this point, Linda Galyon makes a compelling argument that his redefinition is deliberate. Galyon observes that this allows Puttenham to
66 Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 84. 67 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 227. 68 Puttenham, 227. 69 Puttenham, 244. 81 conceptualize poetic language in two distinct ways: enargeia describes the “immediate experience” of poetic language operating “primarily below the level of cognition,” while energeia describes the power of rhetorical figures to “actively involve the mind of the reader.”70 Although intimately linked and inseparable in practice, Puttenham’s emphasis on the aural aspect of language separates the “sound of language from its representational function,” and “make[s] the former as important as the latter for poetry.”71 In this scheme,
Puttenham’s division of enargeia and energeia distinguishes oral performance from thematic content, rendering distinct the different ways in which content and form, res and verba, work to persuade.
This distinction also bears a striking similarity to that in epideictic rhetoric between the variable content of a speech and the conventional, formal display of skill (epideixis) in speaking on a given topic—what Laurent Pernot calls epideictic’s performative aspect. The mere act of saying something in a conventional manner is what confers value on an epideictic utterance, and the ways in which rhetors can derive from the prosodic richness of poetry an eloquence suited to the court makes emphasizing its aural features a useful undertaking. Pernot argues that, as “speech regulated by custom,” epideictic is well suited to “late antiquity, a world where ceremony, especially courtly ceremony, was paramount.”72
Puttenham, I think, recognizes a similar set of discursive requirements in the courtly- aristocratic society of Elizabethan England. However, Puttenham also sees epideixis as a
70 Linda Galyon, “Puttenham’s Enargeia and Energeia: New Twists for Old Terms,” Philological Quarterly 60, no. 1 (1981): 30. 71 Galyon, 32. 72 Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric, 102. 82 means of artful display, marked language that distinguishes itself by its use of figures that
“abuse”—that transform in some way—semantically or stylistically normal, unmarked speech.
In a discussion preceding his list of the “sententious” figures (those that affect both the ear and the mind), Puttenham invokes the common classical and Renaissance humanist myth of the poet-orator as civilizer—that the “songs of the first poet-theologians happened to have a civilizing effect on the primitive populations”73—and outlines the efficacy of primitive poetry’s “pleasant persuasions.” He explains:
Now if our presupposal be true, that the poet is of all other the most ancient orator, as he that by good and pleasant persuasions first reduced the wild and beastly people into public societies and civility of life, insinuating unto them under fictions with sweet and colored speeches many wholesome lessons and doctrines, then no doubt there is nothing so fit for him as to be furnished with all the figures that be rhetorical, and such as do most beautify language with eloquence and sententiousness. Therefore, since we have already allowed to our maker his auricular figures, and also his sensable, by which all the words and clauses of his meters are made as well tunable to the ear as stirring to the mind, we are now by order to bestow upon him those other figures which may execute both offices, and all at once to beautify and give sense and sententiousness to the whole language at large. So as if we should entreat our maker to play also the orator, and whether it be to plead, or to praise, or to advise, that in all three cases he may utter and also persuade both copiously and vehemently.74
By “playing” the orator, the poet is able to encompass the full range of dikanic, epideictic, and symbouleutic functions of discourse—“to plead, or to praise, or to advise.” Puttenham references the humanist commonplace that poets “insinuate” into poetic fictions certain allegorical truths. Yet Puttenham’s is a vision of poetic efficacy that is fundamentally
73 Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 262. 74 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 280-81. 83 different.
By arguing for the importance of the “pleasantness” of figures that are “tunable to the ear” as well as “stirring to the mind,” noting first the prosody common to any elevated discourse, Puttenham in a way anticipates the recent scholarly arguments (noted above) concerning the expansive nature of epideictic. Epideictic can be seen to function in ways that take it beyond its “traditional rhetorical terms, simply as the discourse of ‘praise and blame.’” In such cases, it acts as an inclusive rhetorical genre, “definable … as argument directed toward the establishment, reconfirmation, or revision of general values and beliefs.”75 In short, it is elevated speech that is aided by highly figural language, by ornament, which Puttenham argues is the point of origin for eloquence in any kind of persuasive discourse. Considered as finely wrought figural discourse, many rhetorical motives are able to converge in epideictic, especially in its poetic variants.
Furthermore, by adapting poetic-linguistic strategies to the court, where both social ritual and a need to distinguish oneself govern most modes of discourse, Puttenham foregrounds poetry as a productive art of discourse that does things—Puttenham’s treatment of poetic figuration is a proper logon techne for aristocratic verbal performance.
Heinrich F. Plett has argued that the contrast between “humanistic” and “courtly” stylistics “is not primarily one of ars but of its adaptation to heterogenous social circumstances.”76 Yet the ability for artful discourse to be deployed in various
75 Walker, “Aristotle’s Lyric,” 7. 76 Heinrich F. Plett, “The Place and Function of Style in Renaissance Poetics,” in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 375. 84 “heterogenous” circumstances was once the defining characteristic of rhetoric as a techne.
Discourse as a mode of artful self-presentation—what Puttenham calls the ability of speech to show (and manipulate) the “image of man,” his “mentis character,” or the “mark of the mind”77—thus has ramifications for rhetoric and poetics beyond courtly self-fashioning; the epideictic performativity of poetry as a rhetoric of display has the capacity to serve as a foundation for eloquent discourse generally speaking, providing examples of eloquent speech applicable to various situations of import.
Rhetorical figures are a key part of this process of adapting poetic eloquence to rhetorical situations. As Jeanne Fahnestock has argued, figures represent “formal verbal epitomes of underlying rhetorical functions,” and that, as “psycholinguistically active verbal devices,” the figures should be recognized as the functional basis of argument.78 Her discussion of Aristotle’s notion of energeia is relevant to Puttenham:
The third of the asteia [urbane or polished statements], energeia, belongs to a once robust third division known by a very misleading label as the figures of thought. This category is difficult to define, but we can begin to understand it from the perspective of pragmatics, the dimension of linguistic analysis concerned with what an utterance is supposed to accomplish for the speaker and how it functions in a particular situation. . . . Certainly Aristotle’s energeia fits into a category of figures of thought defined by a pragmatic rationale as would many of the other figures typically grouped here, like frankness of speech (praising listeners by pretending to criticize them) or emphasis (defined in figure manuals as managing to communicate more than is actually said).79
Energeia, like the aural enargeia emphasized by Puttenham, is still situationally defined—
Puttenham must contend with the fact, as Fahnestock makes clear, that there are no
77 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 233. 78 Jeanne Fahnestock, “Aristotle and Theories of Figuration,” in Rereading Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 168. 79 Fahnestock, 169. 85 instructions one can follow or general principles one can infer that can guarantee a speech’s rhetorical efficacy.80
It is telling, then, that Puttenham chooses to further illustrate his account of verbal style using anecdotes of successful courtly speech. Introducing his third book, Puttenham states the following:
The case then standing that discretion must chiefly guide all those businesses, since there be sundry sorts of discretion all unlike, even as there be men of action or art, I see no way so fit to enable a man truly to estimate decency as example. . . . But by reason of the sundry circumstances that man’s affairs are, as it were, wrapped in, this decency comes to be very much alterable and subject to variety, insomuch as our speech asketh one manner of decency in respect of the person who speaks, another of him to whom it is spoken, another of whom we speak, another of what we speak, and in what place and time and to what purpose. And as it is of speech, so of all other behaviors. We will therefore set you down some few examples of every circumstance how it alters the decency of speech or action.81
Puttenham is attempting to account for familiar rhetorical concepts such as decorum and kairos as well as prudential or practical wisdom, all of which are required in cases of good speaking and all of which presuppose the variability of situations and audiences as a problem to be dealt with by the speaker. Puttenham illustrates for his reader how speech, using all the poetic-rhetorical tricks just outlined, can be adapted to changing conditions that are anything but universal.
CONCLUSION According to Victoria Kahn, while “theory includes the intelligence of first causes and the necessary and universal consequences, prudence is concerned with action within the
80 Fahnestock, 169-70. 81 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 349. 86 realm of contingent human affairs.”82 Knowledge of “first causes and the necessary and universal consequences” of poetry is how we might describe Scott’s project compared with
Puttenham’s. The aim of the Model is fundamentally unlike that of the Art—it is a theoretical “model” of poetry, removed from the realm of contingent affairs, and rhetoric is both “everywhere” in it “and nowhere,” as Alexander observes.83 Puttenham, on the other hand, is concerned with making poetics a prudential art—the verbal, performative “display” that both rhetorical epideixis and poetry share, where stylistic innovation’s end is persuasion and admiration and where decorum deals with audiences rather than principles.
Scott’s poetics, in a general sense, conforms to Arthur F. Kinney’s account of humanist poetics, which he argues takes “poetics past the dangers . . . of sophistry.”84
Kinney continues:
At the deepest conceptual roots, then, humanist poetics is both philosophically and rhetorically grounded; it marries both chief interests of the humanist educators. Ethical and stylistic models alike are appealed to—and they may be identical, or spoken of in identical terms. . . . Humanist poetics is, moreover, a poetics that directs thoughts, always, toward abstractions; it leads away from the circumstances and confinements of a mundane world toward more universal conceptualizations which from the start appealed to the humanist temperament and turn of mind and emphasized the usefulness . . . of the Platonic concept of Form while making it seductive and persuasive through rhetorical patternings.85
Scott’s poetics is humanist in this manner: style is essentially an embellishment that
“sweetens” the bitter pill of ethical or philosophical content required for it to be defended or theorized as an educational tool. Persuasion is not poetry’s end as it is with Puttenham,
82 Victoria Kahn, “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia A. Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 376. 83 Scott, Model of Poesy, lxviii. 84 Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 34. 85 Kinney, 35. 87 but a means to an end. I want to argue that Puttenham’s and Scott’s treatises are both legitimate takes on Renaissance poetics; they stem from equally valid but fundamentally different rhetorical-poetic traditions. One is paideutic, concerned with education and with inculcating an ethical and critical facility. The other is concerned with training in a technical skill that is performative and persuasive.
If in considering Renaissance poetry’s place in the rhetorical tradition we view rhetoric as a means primarily of swaying an audience through agonistic deliberation,
Puttenham’s concern with poetic ornament falls short of being a “proper” art of rhetoric. In despotic political circumstances, public debate often does not or cannot occur, or occurs only in a restricted manner. If we are more generous, however, we might see in Puttenham’s account of the figures a foregrounding of their function as techniques of presence,
Perelman’s term, we recall, for the strategies that rhetors use to make certain ideas, facts, and values prominent in the audience’s mind. Perelman observes that considering the
“effects of language and their capacity to evoke establishes the transition between rhetoric as the art of persuasion and as the technique of literary expression.”86 And though Puttenham uses figures derived from a stylistics that came about partly through humanistic, grammatical instruction, the Art has relatively little to do with humanism’s hermeneutic practices. Instead of emphasizing textual analysis, which is the means by which poetry may allegorically or symbolically transmit general principles or normative values, Puttenham is
86 Perelman, Realm of Rhetoric, 35. 88 satisfied with simply offering a toolkit for verbal performance.
How Puttenham conceives of and transmits rhetorical skill has a direct bearing on what I would call his status as a kind of Renaissance “sophist”—in the most positive sense of the term. He is not Sidney’s pedantic “sophister.” His view of poetry closely approximates sophistic, epideictic-centric discourse—not merely a skillful display of eloquence for its own sake, nor a mimesis of naturalistic action or philosophical truth, but an art of figural discourse as it applies to variable, customary situations. The court is indeed a place of patronage, self-advertisement, as well as a forum for verbal dissimulation.87 But writing a poetics for courtiers is also a way for Puttenham to consider features of poetic discourse that exist independently of pedagogical scenarios. Or, to put it another way,
Puttenham emphasizes certain ways in which the goal of poetic language, considered as a type of rhetoric, is not to represent fundamental truths, actions, or characters, but rather to appeal directly to the psychology of persuadable audiences.
Puttenham’s, project, then, may be contrasted with humanist poetics. Humanist poetics is a deeply influential and laudable tradition (and one that Puttenham was undoubtedly influenced by). We can observe humanism’s crucial role in providing the means to defend English poetry against its detractors, first in Elyot’s Governor, where poetry is argued to be both distinct from rhetoric and a tool of aristocratic paideia, an art that is instrumental in the training of the Elizabethan citizen. Elyot provided the argumentative basis for Sidney’s Defence, which in turn provided Scott with the
87 Rebhorn, “Puttenham and the Carnivalization of Rhetoric,” 104. 89 allegorical, Neoplatonic didacticism on which to base his Aristotelianism. Scott’s Model is indeed the fullest expression of a “proper” Elizabethan poetics, perhaps marking an inflection point in the transition from the humanist study of bonae litterae into something approaching modern literary criticism.
Puttenham’s Art, by a circuitous route, embodies the counter-tradition of poetic performance that may be contrasted with poetics derived from this humanist, paideutic tradition. We may caricature Puttenham as Plato’s “authentic Sophist,” a would-be prince- pleasing rake who aims to teach an amoral art of ornament. In fact, he participates in an equally laudable renascence of an ancient tradition that sees poetics as an art of eloquent,
“merely” suasive discourse—and only that. In Puttenham’s case, however, this just so happens to be a conception of rhetoric and poetics “fitter to please the court than the school.”
90 Chapter Three: “Devotion, Not Controversie”: George Herbert’s Temple and Lyric Performativity
INTRODUCTION I argued in chapter one that, while it is widely recognized that lyric approximates epideictic rhetoric, lyric also conceals a broader range of rhetorical motives behind a formal façade both highly stylized and brief. When treated as merely aesthetic objects, to quote
John Stuart Mill once again, lyrics are not heard but “overheard.” They are written to lovers or to friends or to God and are treated as evidence of a private, subjective experience. In modern theory, the lyric is often seen as a dramatized “rehearsal” of this subjective experience, which is recorded in verse as a kind of verbal transliteration of emotion. The rhetoricity of the lyric, in short, has been obscured by our modern post-Romantic tendency to view lyric as a record of spontaneous emotional activity.
One of the more dramatic effects of paideutic poetics, the Aristotelian interpretation of rhetorical style, is also a factor in the development of the Romantic idea of the lyric. As shown in chapter two, William Scott saw style as a miniature Aristotelian “plot,” where stylistic effects mirror the dramatic “turns” that elicit an emotional response from the audience—this amounts to what James Biester has called the Renaissance’s “admirable style,” which aimed for a sense of lyric spectacle on par with that of drama.1
Writers such as Philip Sidney and William Scott looked for a paideutic justification for poetry and were concerned with how poetry either teaches or reflects literary critical or
1 Biester, Lyric Wonder, 18. See also my discussion of style as it relates to Scott’s Model of Poesy in chapter two. 91 natural principles. Their arguments were backed by a long tradition of poetry being used as a tool in paideutic training, the humanistic variant of which formed the basis for the
Renaissance’s dominant poetics. In contrast to paideutic poetics, however, there existed a poetics that emphasized poetry’s performative aspects and thought of poetry largely in terms of how it functioned as a stylistically inventive art of rhetorical “display,” or epideixis. A performative poetics of this type can be found in Puttenham’s Art, which is a text more amenable to the idea of poetry as a mode of rhetorical performance. My concern in the present chapter is to examine how the early modern lyric, in certain contexts, functions as an art of performative epideictic in this manner.
In approaching Renaissance lyric poetry in this way, we may first look to C. S.
Lewis. According to Lewis, the Elizabethan sonneteers produced a body of work that had much more in common with liturgy than with poetry as we understand it. These poets wrote not to express or dramatize personal experiences of love so much as to formalize these experiences in generalizable symbolic terms, to “give us others, the inarticulate lovers, a voice.” For Lewis, this “transferability” of the sonnet approximates public worship:
The reader was to seek in a sonnet not what the poet felt but what he himself felt, what all men felt. A good sonnet . . . was like a good public prayer: the test is whether the congregation can ‘join’ and make it their own, not whether it provides interesting materials for the spiritual biography of the compiler . . . . In this respect the Elizabethan sonnet is comparable to the Elizabethan song . . . . Here again the analogy of a public prayer holds good. The whole body of sonnet sequences is much more like an erotic liturgy than a series of erotic confidences.2
Sonnets were inclusive, “ritualistic” discourse that addressed the feelings had in common
2 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 490–91. 92 by their audience. Lewis here echoes Kenneth Burke and others who treat literature as an
“epideictic encounter,” a rhetorical address that may argue a point and persuade, but the ultimate purpose of which is to invite the audience to participate in a ritual act of
“unburdening.”3 Through this process of unburdening, the writer and audience are identified “consubstantially”; in “acting together,” according to Burke, people share the
“common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, [and] attitudes that make them consubstantial.”4 Literature, in this respect, acts as groundwork for cooperative acts.
In settings of private and public worship, these ritual and communal functions of epideictic are relevant to our understanding of the devotional lyric, particularly its role in facilitating cooperation and in fostering the spiritual connection of “members of an audience who find that the speaker is saying exactly what needs to be said” and “who find that they are being caught up in a celebration of their vision of reality.”5 The analogy that
Lewis makes to religious liturgy and the public performance of devotion should be understood here also in light of Burke’s understanding of literature as “equipment for living”6: the devotional lyric is a formalized poetic strategy for dealing with recurrent situations that require devotional utterance—it gives “others, the inarticulate lovers”—in this case, of God—“a voice.”
Owing to their religious subject matter, the devotional poets of the early seventeenth century approach liturgy more closely than the Elizabethan sonneteers, but like
3 Dale L. Sullivan, “The Ethos of Epideictic Encounter,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 26, no. 2 (1993): 113–33; Burke, “Philosophy of Literary Form,” 92. 4 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 21. 5 Sullivan, “Ethos of Epideictic Encounter,” 128. 6 Burke, “Philosophy of Literary Form,” 61. 93 the sonneteers they comprise a “school” only in loosest sense of that term. These poets have been described variously as members of literary circles, such as those frequented by
Donne, or the religiously inclined members of the “metaphysical” school described originally by Samuel Johnson and later by H. J. C. Grierson, Helen Gardner, and T. S.
Eliot.7
Samuel Johnson’s comments on the metaphysical poets, found in his Life of Cowley
(1779), are worth noting here. His are perhaps the most succinctly hostile of the many statements made about these poets, yet the manner in which Johnson vituperates against the metaphysicals is interesting. Johnson displays particular unease with how these poets seem merely to “versify,” or to only offer poetic “showmanship”:
The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to shew their learning was their whole endeavour: but, unluckily resolving to shew it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.
And it is because these poems are merely “verses” and not proper poetry that Johnson cites
7 The most prominent members of this group of poets are John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw. See A. Alvarez, The School of Donne (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961); Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 1.199-200; H. J. C. Grierson, ed., Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921); Helen Gardner, ed., The Metaphysical Poets (London: Penguin Classics, 1960); T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 241–50. For an argument against “metaphysical” as a category of poets/poetry, see the introduction to Harold B. Segel, The Baroque Poem: A Comparative Survey (New York: Dutton, 1974), 3–14. For an argument for the relevance of the term, see Colin Burrow, “Metaphysical Poets,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/95605. Burrow also provides the following concise description: “It is traditionally said that the group was united by the use of far-fetched comparisons, or ‘conceits’, that drew attention to their own ingenuity—although this is more evidently a feature of Donne's work than that of other members of the group. It has also sometimes been suggested that these poets are metaphysical in the sense that they combine thought (or metaphysical speculation) with feeling in ways that were distinctive to the seventeenth century. This claim likewise fits some poets and some poems better than others.” 94 Aristotle, “the father of criticism”:
If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry τέχνη µιµητιχή [techne mimetike], an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor life, neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect . . . . But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.8
Two and a half centuries after Thomas Elyot, Johnson makes essentially the same point as
Elyot’s Governor: as we have seen, for Elyot, “versifiers” are not poets just as sophistical
“rhetoricians” are not orators. Because they do not imitate and because they only show off, these poets have no claim to truth; instead of being decorously imitated, nature is
“ransacked” for raw material.
In the modern era, the estimations of writers such as Donne, Cowley, and Herbert have risen thanks to the influence of several important critics. Rehabilitation of the metaphysicals was one of the many critical accomplishments of Eliot, who in fact takes pains to acknowledge the qualities Johnson dismisses:
With the religious verse of Donne, as with that of Milton, one is aware of a prodigious mastery of the language employed upon religious subjects; with that of Crashaw, of a passionate fancy and a metrical ability which might also have employed themselves upon other than religious themes; and even with Gerard Hopkins,9 I find myself wondering whether there is an essential relation between
8 Johnson, Lives, 1.199-200. 9 Gerard Manley Hopkins, though he wrote much later and is not a “metaphysical” in the sense used by most critics, is seen by Eliot to have accomplished similar feats: he wrote on religious subject matter and showed a genius for metrical innovation. 95 his contribution to poetry and his religious vocation.10
We see here that “passionate fancy” and “metrical ability” are, for Eliot, evidence of a kind self-control, a careful application of poetic genius to devotional subject matter—what
Louis L. Martz would later call the “poetry of meditation.”11
Yet Eliot falls back on a pointedly Romantic notion, that poetry is, at its core, the expression of feeling, or at least an accurate representation of that feeling, rather than argument. Metaphysical poetry excels not because its proper imitation of nature but because of its “direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling.” The post-metaphysical writers of the later seventeenth century fall into the trap of
Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility.”12 And with this comes the “danger” of inauthenticity.
Eliot explains:
All poetry is difficult, almost impossible, to write: and one of the great permanent causes of error in writing poetry is the difficulty of distinguishing between what one really feels and what one would like to feel, and between the moments of genuine feeling and the moments of falsity. This is a danger in all poetry: but it is a peculiarly grave danger in the writing of devotional verse.
It is Herbert, in Eliot’s mind, who most successfully attains the unity of sincere purpose and actual accomplishment (Eliot has some harsh words for Donne, which we will see in the next chapter). For Eliot, Herbert is “as secure, as habitually sure, as any poet who has
10 T. S. Eliot, “George Herbert,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 4.413. 11 Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954). 12 Eliot, “Metaphysical Poets,” 246. 96 written in English.”13
While I certainly agree with Eliot about Herbert, I think his position on what was powerful about the metaphysicals betrays the kind of lingering Romantic focus on expression that diverts attention away from what is most adept in Herbert’s writing. Herbert is the most successful devotional poet, in my mind, not because he is the sincerest, but because he was the most skillful and of the most useful for his audience. And it is this adeptness, not a greater sincerity of feeling, that marks Herbert as fundamentally distinct from, say, Donne. Unlike Donne, Herbert addresses devotional experience in a manner that was compelling not only to an audience who appreciated his facility with lyric, but more specifically to an audience who used him for devotional purposes. Herbert, in other words, was a crafter of discourse meant to serve a purpose and that did in fact serve that purpose: he portrays the “common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, [and] attitudes” he shared with his audience in order to provide consolatory discourse—and he did so in a way much more easily digestible than the idiosyncratic, brilliant, but often tortured verses of Donne.14
Why I emphasize the dissimilarity between Herbert and Donne is that many prominent studies have likened the two, especially with respect to the ways in which coterie exchange influenced their poetry. Cristina Malcolmson goes so far as to claim that “[w]hen
George Herbert announced his relationship to the English literary tradition, it was largely a family affair”—and that the contemporary reputation of his poetry was mainly due to its
13 Eliot, “George Herbert,” 4.413. 14 Martz argues one of the (many) differences between the two poets is “Donne’s instability and Herbert’s deeply achieved security.” “The Action of the Self: Devotional Poetry in the Seventeenth-Century,” in Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), 108. 97 circulation in manuscript during Herbert’s life, which, at least while he was alive, restricted
Herbert’s poems to readers in the Sidney-Herbert clan and those affiliated with it.15 (Donne traded poems with both George and William Herbert, Sidney’s nephew, participating in this communal, aristocratic poetic practice.16)
Herbert’s participation in the Sidney-Herbert literary coterie has been greatly overemphasized. While these studies that have investigated Herbert’s cultural milieu provide a more nuanced picture of Herbert, his early court hopes and possible gambits for patronage, and the effect his aristocratic heritage had on his verse,17 they generally paint
Herbert, like Donne, as a failed courtier or an aristocrat who sublimates a fascination with power into his devotional rhetoric. While I think this provides a useful corrective to previous scholarship’s emphasis on Herbert’s meditative “inwardness,” whether Protestant or Anglo-Catholic,18 these studies seem overly taken with the notion that Herbert’s turn to
15 Cristina Malcolmson, “George Herbert and Coterie Verse,” George Herbert Journal 18, no. 1 (1995): 159. For the practice of coterie verse as it relates to Donne and Herbert, see also Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); “Patronage, Poetry, and Print,” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 1–26. 16 Helen Wilcox, “Herbert, George (1593–1633),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 159, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13025. 17 See, in particular, Ronald W. Cooley, ‘Full of All Knowledg’: George Herbert’s Country Parson and Early Modern Social Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); “George Herbert’s Country Parson and the Character of Social Identity,” Studies in Philology 85, no. 2 (1988): 245–66; Michael Carl Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); “‘That Spectacle of Too Much Weight’: The Poetics of Sacrifice in Donne, Herbert, and Milton,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 3 (2001): 561–84; Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 83–117; “Sanctifying the Aristocracy: ‘Devout Humanism’ in François de Sales, John Donne, and George Herbert,” The Journal of Religion 69, no. 1 (1989): 36–58. 18 The foundational work in this regard is Martz, Poetry of Meditation. Lewalski argues, counter to Martz, that the meditative tradition in England can be traced to Protestant rather than to Catholic practices. See Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 147–48. 98 religion was the result of frustrated ambition, and that, in a similar way to how we approach
Donne, our focus should be on how Herbert’s verse was received before it was published— that is, before it found an audience beyond Herbert’s immediate, aristocratic circle.
Relatively little has been said about the use of Herbert’s poetry as public discourse outside of his coterie. To place Herbert in the tradition of Donne, concerned with the circulation of manuscripts among aristocratic readers, is to leave uninvestigated what is, from a rhetorical point of view, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of The Temple—its use as a public devotional text. While scholars place this work in the tradition of the lyrical innovations of Sidney (who was clearly an influence, and Herbert’s distant relative by marriage19) and—not surprisingly—Donne, some have sought to elevate Herbert’s standing. Helen Wilcox, for example, claims that “it is more accurate to speak of a school of Herbert than a school of Donne.”20 And in the seventeenth century, Oliver Heywood went so far as to call Herbert the “second David,” “that incomparable sweet Singer of our
Israel.”21 Indeed, like the psalms, Herbert’s lyrics both perform devotion and invite devotional performance in a way that distances him from Donne; and how these poets differ in their approach to devotional poetry, I argue, tells us a great deal about how the diversity of poetic aims in the Renaissance are manifested in lyric practice.
Herbert has, in fact, already been recognized for the performative quality of his
19 Philip Sidney’s sister, Mary, married Henry Herbert, the second Earl of Pembroke. She is referenced in the title of Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. 20 Wilcox, “Herbert, George (1593–1633).” 21 Oliver Heywood, Heart-Treasure Part II (London, 1672), 119. Quoted in Wilcox, “Herbert’s Musical Contexts: From Countrey-Aires to Angels Musick,” in Like Season’d Timber: New Essays on George Herbert, ed. Edmund Miller and Robert DiYanni (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 55. 99 lyrics. Derek Attridge cites Herbert’s “Easter” as an example of poetry that calls attention to poetic language as “performance,” particularly the qualities that make one “aware of language’s power.” Attridge outlines poetic performance in a way I find especially compelling: “A reading of the poem that activates such qualities is a performance of it, whether spoken aloud, heard in someone else’s reading, read silently on the page, or recited in the mind from memory, and it is in such performances that it comes into being, each time, as a poem. Every performance is different from all others.” Moreover, performing a poem is different from interpreting or analyzing it:
Reading a poem as a literary work is different from reading it for, say, the purposes of doctrinal instruction, or as historical evidence; these are not performances but interpretations geared to the extraction of truth . . . . One need have no belief in the Resurrection to perform Herbert’s poem and to feel the power of its literary eventness—though one does need to understand, and feel, what it is to believe.22
Quite different from Samuel Johnson’s reader, who, “though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased,” Attridge’s reader is taken with the lyric’s “eventness.” Far from art for art’s sake, I would add, the poem as performance is a mechanism of rhetorical identification: fundamentally, this incitement to perform a poem leads not to a rehearsal or a recreation of feeling, but to feeling that acts as the rhetorical mechanism of identification and persuasion.
To put this another way, as stylized epideictic, the devotional lyric is both a display of rhetorical skill and a mechanism to address, through performance and re-performance, the “type situations” of devotion, doing so in a manner that identifies devotional verse as
22 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), 99–100. 100 one of the epideictic genres that comprise the performative art of the lyric. The situations of Herbert’s readership are where this performativity is most fully realized, and it is to these devotional situations that I now turn.
THE TEMPLE AS LITURGY Targoff has made a compelling case that Herbert meant for his poems to be used as an aid in worship23—Herbert perhaps even revised and repurposed verse from his youth to suit this end. Unfortunately, we know precious little about Herbert’s intentions or participation in planning the first edition of The Temple, which appeared in 1633 shortly after his death that same year. The most compelling account comes secondhand, from Izaak
Walton’s somewhat dubious hagiographic biography. Nicholas Ferrar, who oversaw the printing of the 1633 edition, received most of Herbert’s unpublished manuscripts after his death and considered himself Herbert’s literary executor. A fellow priest, Edmund Duncan, was instructed to give to Ferrar Herbert’s “private Writings,” which included a manuscript copy of The Temple.24 Though not a fair copy fit for the printer, this manuscript was a complete work. In its published version, the only major addition was likely an epigram taken from the Prayer Book version of Psalm 29.8, “In his Temple doth euery man speake of his honor.”25
23 Targoff, Common Prayer, 116. 24 Amy M. Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 179–80. 25 Charles, 185. This is yet another dissimilarity between Herbert and Donne. As modern editors well know, Donne was much less concerned with—or, due to illness, was simply not up to the task of—organizing his poems at the end of his life. 101 Composed many years after the fact and almost certainly exaggerated, Walton’s description of Herbert’s instructions to publish this work is nevertheless intriguing. Given the “decaying conditions of [his] body,” Herbert intreats Duncan to
deliver this little Book to my dear brother Farrer, and tell him, he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master: in whose service I have now found perfect freedom; desire him to read it; and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected and poor soul? let it be made publick: if not? let him burn it: for I and it, are less than the least of Gods mercies.26
Though Walton’s Herbert is an idealized version of the author—Walton even has Herbert quote in the last sentence here a line from his own poetry, itself a modified line from
Genesis—Walton is not too far off the mark. The line quoted served as Herbert’s personal motto, and Herbert indeed spoke of poetry that grew out of the spiritual conflict of his younger days, before he “subjected” his will to Christ and joined the priesthood.
And, whatever the case, there is an abundance of evidence that the dejected and poor souls referenced in Walton’s Life needed help, and that Herbert’s Temple was of help to them. As Targoff argues, like other Anglican churchmen, Herbert would have agreed with the rationale concerning standardized worship: that justification by faith alone required much more than extemporaneous prayer, and that the liturgical practices of the
Church were designed in large part to provide the psychological assurance of an official or
“legitimized” mode of worship.
Moreover, English divines such as Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker argued
26 Izaak Walton, The Life of Mr. George Herbert, in The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert, 4th ed. (London: Tho. Roycroft for Richard Marriot, 1675), 321. 102 that a standardized liturgy would address problems that stemmed from a lack of devotional
“skill,” what Samuel Hieron in his popular prayer manual, A Helpe unto Devotion (1608), called the gap between rhetorical skill and devotional “desire.” Hieron, in words reminiscent of Plato’s Gorgias, argues that the failure of worshippers to be their own
“messengers” stems from the “want of exercised wits, of knowledge in the Scriptures, and especially of experience in the power of godliness, and of a lively sense and distinct conceiving of their own personal necessities”—in short, worshippers are unable to fully conceptualize their “art,” and so technically fall short of the mark. A standardized liturgy would, in effect, bypass the problems stemming from the lack of “exercised wits” by going directly to the emotional source of devotion, the experience of worship that evokes the
“lively sense and distinct conceiving” of their spiritual needs being met.27
Hieron and other writers sought to inculcate good rhetorical habits of devotion through the use of handbooks—and, Targoff claims, with The Temple Herbert sought to provide a kind of a poetic “manual” in keeping with this practice of providing readymade, devotionally effective speech. Poetry, then, was simply one of many stylistically effective modes of speech with which to address God both in private and public devotional settings.
Targoff’s key insight is that, for Herbert and other English churchmen and divines, both congregants and God were seen as audiences to be moved by prayer and public worship.
For Herbert and for most of his contemporary readership, God was not a deity who responded to sincerity alone or who would have valued extemporaneous prayer simply by
27 Samuel Hieron, A Helpe unto Devotion, Containing Certain Moulds or Formes of Prayer, 6th ed. (London, 1614), sig. A3r-A7r. Quoted in Targoff, Common Prayer, 90. 103 virtue of it being sincere. Therefore, the “liturgical control” of devotional rhetoric was of supreme importance: standardized liturgical practices would ensure that public devotion manifested the traits that could get God’s attention. Targoff explains:
For early modern churchgoers, common prayer had two important aspects. First, it was a standardized devotional practice, a public activity in which all English subjects were required to participate weekly. Second, in the form of the Prayer Book, it was a collection of premeditated texts, whose very formalization ensured, in the view of the established churchmen, a devotional efficacy that could not be attained with spontaneous and original prayers.28
Sincerity simply was not enough. What was needed instead was closer attention to the
“devotional efficacy”—a key term here—of prayer and public worship, which was part of a larger project of emphasizing the aesthetic worth of ritual and what would come to be called the “beauty of holiness.”29 Most important, however, was that this mode of address was directed at God, oneself, and the congregation at large, with praise and petition also acting as a forms of self-persuasion and group persuasion.
The rhetorical situations of public devotion in the seventeenth-century English
Church approximate what Davida H. Charney, in her study of the psalms, has called the
“performativity” of psalmic rhetoric. She observes that, in their original performances,
many psalms directly or indirectly address the assembly, and, in some cases, the speaker engages in explicit self-address. In an important sense, the psalms always involve a form of self-persuasion for the ostensible speaker. A person who works out the reasons for God to take action necessarily rehearses the community’s core
28 Targoff, Common Prayer, 4. 29 For discussions of the “beauty of holiness,” see Peter Lake, “The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity, and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s,” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1993), 161–85; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006). 104 beliefs and standards of behavior.30
Like these ancient ritual situations, the English Church sought to align congregants’ internal ethical orientations and outward behavior through performances of public devotional rhetoric. Cranmer’s litany of 1544, incorporated virtually unchanged into the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer, worked as regulatory discourse—a
“rehearsal of the community’s core values,” as well as a tacit argument for individual and group worth and an explicit plea for divine action.31 We can see both strategies at work in the litany’s various petitions for divine action. One example is the prayer for “fayre weather”:
Lorde God, which for the synne of man diddest ones drowne al the worlde, excepte eight persons, and afterward of thy great mercy diddest promise never to destroy it so againe: we humblye beseche the, that althoughe we for our iniquities have worthely deserved this Plague of raigne and waters: yet upon oure own true repentaunce, thou wilt sende us suche wether, whereby we may receyve the fruites of the yearth in due season, and learne both by thy punishment to amende our lives, and for thy clemency to geve thee prayse and glorye, throughe Jesus Christ our Lorde. Amen.
This follows a recognizable rhetorical pattern. God is reminded of the covenant, petitioned for good weather so that utterers will receive the “fruites of the yearth in due season,” and then promised praise as recompense. Similarly, the Prayer of Chrisotome is essentially a petition to God to grant petitions:
Almighty god, which hast geven us grace at this tyme with one accorde, to make our common supplications unto the, and doost promise, that when two or three be gathered in thy name, thou wilt graunt their requestes: fulfyl nowe, O lord, the desires and peticions of thy servauntes, as may be most expedient for them,
30 Davida H. Charney, “Performativity and Persuasion in the Hebrew Book of Psalms: A Rhetorical Analysis of Psalms 116 and 22,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010): 254. 31 See Charney, “Maintaining Innocence Before a Divine Hearer,” Biblical Interpretation 21, no. 1 (2013): 33–63. 105 graunting us in this world knowledge of thy truthe, & in the wordle to come lyfe everlastynge. Amen.32
Here we have discourse that is strategically very similar to what Charney observes in the psalms: though much less vehemently stated here, as is the case with the psalms, “it is incumbent on God to take action to reestablish the accustomed bond” with the congregants.33
Control of worship, in this manner, encourages the ongoing participation of God in human affairs—and, being contingent on discourse, the rhetorical stakes could not be higher. Though control over worship became a point of dire controversy during William
Laud’s tenure (he was installed as Archbishop in 1633, the year of Herbert’s death, and what Herbert would have thought about the increasingly autocratic control of worship by
Laud in the 1630s is anyone’s guess),34 I think it safe to assume that Herbert shared
Donne’s rather common-sense position on the control of worship as a counter to anarchic
Puritan vehemence. Donne explains:
It is not always a bold and vehement reprehension of great persons, that is argument enough of a good and rectified zeale, for an intemperate use of the liberty of the Gospell, and sometimes the impotency of a satyricall humor, makes men preach freely, and over-freely, offensively, scandalously; and so exasperate the magistrate; God forbid that man should build a reputation of zeale, for having been called in
32 Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 122. 33 Charney, “Performativity and Persuasion,” 253. 34 Many were also concerned about the future of the church in this anxious, pre-Civil War period, especially after the proposed match of Prince Charles to the Catholic infanta of Spain. It is interesting to note, however, that the “The Church Militant,” the penultimate poem of The Temple, contains two positive references to Spain in addition to stated concerns about the future of his church. On this point, Herbert is characteristically ambiguous. 106 question for preaching of a Sermon.35
Donne excoriates the Puritans for attacking preachers who follow the king’s directions to not preach about the overly divisive (and anxiety-provoking) issue of salvation—and
Donne adds a characteristic ironic flourish, that those who preach correctly can identify their “zeale” by being publicly denounced by Puritans. Preaching “over-freely” would not only exasperate the magistrate, though; God, too, would be exasperated by the “offensive” and “scandalous” rhetoric and the “intemperate use of the liberty of the Gospell.”
Indeed, as Peter Lake observes, Laud’s was only the most “coherent, distinctive, polemically aggressive” expression of an entrenched and widely accepted “ritual response” to the “presence of the divine in the world.”36 And it is quite reasonable to assume that
Herbert took something like the “beauty of holiness” to be an effective “inducement to lay piety,” as Lake puts it.37 Whatever Herbert thought of beautifying churches and “Anglo-
Catholic ceremonialism,” Targoff explains, “there was nothing novel about the Laudian desire to secure liturgical worship at the center of devotional life,” and, furthermore, “the aversion to spontaneous prayers often associated with the decade immediately preceding the English civil war pervaded the established church, with varying degrees of intensity, from the midsixteenth century.”38 In part, this was the result of a renewed interest in ceremonialist aesthetics, but it was also due to the “endeavor to place liturgy rather than
35 John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 3.336. Quoted in R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 434. 36 Lake, “Laudian Style,” 162. 37 Lake, 175. 38 Targoff, Common Prayer, 89. 107 the sermon at the centre of services,” and it is this that would have been the most marked— and, for some, the most attractive—change.39
Herbert addresses the problem of devotional speech thematically in his poems, but even the way in which The Temple was first published would have communicated to its readership that Herbert’s poems were meant to aid worship. And this concern about the effectiveness of liturgy naturally coincides with “self-consciousness about the role of rhetorical skill or eloquence in heightening the worshipper’s devotion.”40 Unlike the first edition of Donne’s poetry, for example, The Temple “emphasizes the title and even the subtitle of the volume over Herbert’s name, and fails to mention either his career as a parson or his tenure as a Cambridge Orator.” Other information commonly supplied is absent, such things as dedicatory poems, a portrait, and “in the case of a posthumous volume, elegies and commendatory verses in honor of the deceased.”41 Furthermore, the printer’s note that was included in the first edition suggests that Herbert had little desire to include these secular preliminaries:
The dedication of this work having been made by the Author to the Divine Majesty only, how should we now presume to interest any mortal man in the patronage of it? Much less think we it meet to seek the recommendation of the Muses, for that which himself was confident to have been inspired by a diviner breath than flows from Helicon. The world therefore shall receive it in that naked simplicity, with which he left it, without any addition either of support or ornament, more than is
39 Keith A. Newman, “Holiness in Beauty? Roman Catholics, Arminians, and the Aesthetics of Religion in Early Caroline England,” in The Church and the Arts, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Ecclesiastical History Society, 1997), 303. 40 Targoff, Common Prayer, 89. 41 Targoff, 112. 108 included in it self.42
Malcolmson contends that this is evidence that Herbert built an “inner” temple, safe from the disputative atmosphere of agonistic literary circles.43 Herbert’s polemics against overly florid style—such as in “Jordan” (II), where he argues against “Curling with metaphors a plain intention, / Decking the sense, as if it were to sell” (5-6)44—do at first seem to suggest that Herbert’s “inner” Temple is deliberately separate from the world of witty verbal contest. However, by the time of his death, and after a tenure in the priesthood, Herbert, like Donne, might have simply engaged far less with such aristocratic poetic practices than he did in his youth. And that his book was “naked” and “simple”—or at least that he advertised it to be so in his poems—probably made his work that much more attractive to an audience of literate worshippers, which is exactly what the publication history of The
Temple suggests.
The Temple’s first edition of 1633 was published in a duodecimo-sized book, a format that was usually reserved for inexpensive copies of the Book of Common Prayer and the Psalter. Its publisher, Cambridge University Press, at the time published mostly liturgical texts, grammar books, theological treatises, and very little poetry—in 1633, The
Temple was the only book of devotional lyrics to be published by Cambridge. Furthermore, as Targoff points out, the 1633 Temple looks like an English prayer book—not only is it portable, but it also uses similar printed ornaments and even the same symbol, the pilcrow
42 George Herbert, The Temple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1633), 2r. 43 Malcolmson, Heart-Work, 66–67. 44 All references to Herbert’s poetry are from The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 109 (¶), that the inexpensive editions of the Book of Common Prayer use to separate major sections (poems in The Temple, the weekly readings and collects from the scriptural passages in the prayer book).45
The Temple’s first edition also contains Ferrar’s “Printer to the reader,” which contains direct references to public devotion. In what amounts to both a brief biographical note and an advertisement of Herbert’s piety, Ferrar says the following:
His obedience and conformitie to the Church, and the discipline thereof was singularly remarkable. Though he abounded in private devotions, yet went he every morning and evening with his familie to the Church; and by his example, exhortations, and encouragements drew the greater part of his parishioners to accompanie him dayly in the publick celebration of the Divine Service.46
Targoff notes that this is “the only personally inflected moment in the entire apparatus of the first edition”47— probably because it speaks more to the publisher’s concern with how
Herbert presents himself to the audience as “a pattern or more for the age he lived in” than as a poet.48 Herbert’s volume, unlike Donne’s, whose lyrics were published in quarto format and with the usual “ornaments,” advertised itself as a text that would complement the other devotional and theological texts disseminated by Cambridge Press.
Given the differences in how they were disseminated, the “schools” of Herbert and of Donne were actually two very different traditions, at least from the standpoint of devotional use. Where Donne had little effect on public devotional practices, Herbert, as
45 Targoff, Common Prayer, 116–17. Marotti argues that the duodecimo Temple also legitimized print as a medium with which to express High Church devotion; print thus gained an aristocratic appeal that it lacked before, which led to its becoming an “acceptable” medium for disseminating secular lyric poetry. See Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 256–59. 46 Herbert, Temple, A2v. 47 Targoff, Common Prayer, 116. 48 Herbert, Temple, A3r. 110 we will see, continued to be used for public devotion well into the eighteenth century.
PERFORMATIVITY IN THE COUNTRY PARSON Before turning to The Temple, it is worth examining A Priest to the Temple, or, The
Country Parson (afterwards The Country Parson). It is here that Herbert’s attitude toward devotional speech is most explicit. There has already been substantial work done on The
Country Parson’s similarity to rhetoric and courtesy manuals,49 so I will restrict my discussion here to the points that are most relevant to Herbert’s poetry. No sermons by
Herbert have survived; this unfortunate fact prevents us from directly comparing Herbert’s poetry with what were surely eloquent works of prose.
Herbert argues that holy scripture is the ideal text for the parson to perform, which is unsurprising. Yet the terminology he uses is telling. In a well-known passage, Herbert describes the parson’s ethos as not “witty, or learned, or eloquent, but Holy.” A holy character, he continues, is one that “Hermogenes never dream’d of, and therefore he could give no precepts thereof.” Herbert does have some general advice, however:
But [a holy character] is gained, first, by choosing texts of Devotion, not Controversie, moving and ravishing texts, whereof the scriptures are full. Secondly, by dipping, and seasoning all our words and sentences in our hearts, before they come into our mouths, truly affecting, and cordially expressing all that we say; so that the auditors may plainly perceive that every word is hart-deep. Thirdly, by
49 Two illuminating studies by Kristine A. Wolberg examine The Country Parson from a generic and rhetorical standpoint. Wolberg argues that The Country Parson owes much to Renaissance courtesy books, particularly Gauzzo, Castiglione, and Della Casa, and that Herbert was concerned with reforming the behavior of the clergy, which had fallen into disrepute. See ‘All Possible Art’: George Herbert’s The Country Parson (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008); “George Herbert’s The Country Parson and Stefano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation,” George Herbert Journal 27, no. 1 (2006): 105–18. Stanley Fish, on the other hand, reads The Country Parson—dubiously, in my opinion—as Herbert’s “anti-rhetorical” wish to surrender agency to God. See “‘Void of Storie’: The Struggle for Insincerity in Herbert’s Prose and Poetry,” in Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 147–68. 111 turning often, and making many Apostrophes to God.50
The importance of a holy attitude is that it derives from a devotional, not “controversial,” attitude toward scripture; selecting devotional matter from scripture, “moving and ravishing texts,” in the parson’s case ensures an effective performance. (This could also be a strategy to avoid controversial subject matter, such as the issues of salvation and election central to Puritan preaching.) As Kristine A. Wolberg observes, Herbert is not concerned with internal matters here, what is “hart-deep.” Where the “typical clerical handbook in
Herbert’s day focused on the pastor’s heart or inner self,” Herbert’s Country Parson, like a courtesy book or rhetoric manual, focuses instead on the “self in society or man before men” rather than the self before God.51 He is concerned, in short, with how words and their performance affect an audience. Herbert’s emphasizes the usefulness of the apostrophic display of turning to God before an audience and what attitude this act puts on display.
Puttenham would call this the ability of the parson to show his “mentis character,” or the “mark of the mind,” and it is worth comparing Herbert and Puttenham on this point.
In his section “On Style” (from his third book on the same subject), Puttenham discusses style in terms of its ability to display character:
And because this continual course and manner of writing or speech showeth the matter and disposition of the writer’s mind more than one or few words or sentences can show, therefore there be that have called style the image of man (mentis character), for man is but his mind, and as his mind is tempered and qualified, so are his speeches and language at large, and his inward conceits be the mettle of his mind, and his manner of utterance the very warp and woof of his conceits, more plain, or busy and intricate, or otherwise affected after the rate. Most men say that
50 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 233. 51 Wolberg, “Country Parson,” 115. 112 not any one point in all physiognomy is so certain as to judge a man’s manners by his eye, but more assuredly, in mine opinion, by his daily manner of speech and ordinary writing. For if the man be grave, his speech and style is grave; if light- headed, his style and language also light; if the mind be haughty and hot, the speech and style is also vehement and stirring; if it be cold and temperate, the style is also very modest; if it be humble or base and meek, so is also the language and style.52
The rhetor’s mentis character, according to Puttenham, can indeed be a genuine reflection of one’s inner state (“if the man be grave, his speech and style is grave”). However, rhetorical self-presentation, as is the case with any productive craft, is the act of molding the malleable material of the self (note the “mettle”/“metal” pun53), which is “composed” for the benefit of the audience. What lends force, or energeia, to the parson’s presentation of ethos can be an expression both sincere and artfully composed, rendered with the appropriate verbal ornamentation. The parson has the ability to compose his ethos the same way he would compose a sermon.
Much has been made of the disconnect between the parson’s or the congregant’s inner self and his outward show, or “play-acting.” Katherine Eisaman Maus, for example, argues that standardized public ritual, especially because it coexisted with religious persecution, failed to align the sincere, inner, possibly heretical self and the outer, orthodox, yet possibly insincere self, and that the inner lives of early modern churchgoers approached the modern experience of selfhood: fragmented, with certain parts kept secret.54 But as Targoff rightly points out, the desire of worshippers for more skillful
52 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 233. 53 This is pointed out by Whigham and Rebhorn in an explanatory note. See Puttenham, 233 n. 7. 54 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 28. Malcolmson, on the other hand, argues that the theatrical aspect is what wholly defines the parson’s ethos. See Heart-Work, 43–44. 113 devotional speech and the explosion of early modern devotional manuals (which Herbert’s manual for preachers in many ways is) “undermines the common assumption among twentieth-century critics that sincerity alone determined the quality of early modern devotional performance.”55 Insofar as Herbert’s book concerns delivery, pronuntiatio or actio, Herbert could simply be showing his book to be rhetorically expedient; it is the manner by which the parson establishes a holy ethos through the performance of scripture or scripturally inspired discourse that he will be able to move his hearers. Herbert’s parson could very well be authentic and sincere, but he is also aware of the oratorical and even self-persuasive power of speech and gesture.
In his chapter on communal prayer, while noting for good measure the parson’s
“inner” relationship with God, Herbert again shifts quickly to the parson’s performance:
The Countrey Parson, when he is to read divine services, composeth himself to all possible reverence; lifting up his heart and hands, and eyes, and using all other gestures which may express a hearty, and unfeyned devotion. This he doth, first, as being truly touched and amazed with the Majesty of God, before whom he then presents himself; yet not as himself alone, but as presenting with himself the whole congregation, whose sins he then beares, and brings with his own to the heavenly altar to be bathed, and washed in the sacred Laver of Christs blood. Secondly, as this is the true reason of his inward fear, so he is content to expresse this outwardly to the utmost of his power; that being first affected himself, hee may affect also his people knowing that no Sermon moves them so much to a reverence, which they forget againe, when they come to pray, as a devout behavior in the very act of praying. Accordingly, his voyce is humble, his words treatable, and slow; yet not so slow neither, as to let the fervency of the supplicant hang and dy between speaking, but with a grave liveliness, between fear and zeal, pausing yet pressing, he performs his duty.56
The parson’s relationship with God, crucially, is not “as himself alone, but as presenting
55 Targoff, “Poetics of Common Prayer,” 473. 56 Herbert, Works of George Herbert, 231. 114 with himself the whole congregation.” The parson’s approach to the spiritual text, furthermore, is concerned not just with interpreting scripture but with displaying it in a way that matches up to its inherent rhetorical power:
The Parsons Method in handling of a text consists of two parts; first, a plain and evident declaration of the meaning of the text; and secondly, some choyce Observations drawn out of the whole text, as it lyes entire, and unbroken in the Scripture it self. This he thinks naturall, and sweet, and grave. Whereas the other way of crumbling a text into small parts, as, the Person speaking, or spoken to, the subject, and object, and the like, hath neither in it sweetnesse, nor gravity, nor variety, since the words apart are not Scripture, but a dictionary, and may be considered alike in all the Scripture.57
Herbert, in short, approaches scripture as a script for performance, one that shows not just its meaning but the power of the biblical text as manifested in the preacher’s delivery of it.
Malcolmson’s point about The Country Parson is helpful here, that “[f]or Herbert,
‘character’ referred directly to the process of a public self-presentation . . . . To have a ‘holy character’ was not to be spiritually minded but to make that spiritual mindedness public.”58
Malcolmson is certainly correct, but I think for a different reason than she cites (a disjunct between artful self-presentation and true piety). We should also keep in mind Stanley
Fish’s observation about Malcolmson’s and other readings of The Country Parson, that they “leave in place the same familiar oppositions—between surface and depth, artifice and substance, show and reality—that were assumed and honored by those whose view of
Herbert and his parson were less critical and more benign.” Fish goes on to argue, though,
(echoing Rosemond Tuve) that, far from self-presentation, Herbert wishes for “self-
57 Herbert, 234–35. 58 Malcolmson, “Herbert’s Country Parson,” 246. 115 immolation,” a somewhat sinister wish to eliminate both his own self and selves of his parishioners in an act of sacrifice before the almighty—and, conveniently for Fish, any argument by Herbert concerning the ability of the parson to sincerely act out his piety is actually ironic and insincere.59 This last claim I find suspect, as it leaves in place another familiar opposition, that between the apparent sincerity of a rhetorical performance and actual insincerity behind it.
A more nuanced approach can be found in Perelman’s notion of the epideictic rhetor as “educator”60—which applies especially well here to Herbert’s purpose in sermonizing. Rather than taking apart scripture in a kind of hermeneutic or grammatical exercise, for Herbert’s parson scripture serves a rhetorically and ethically instructive role.
It provides commonplaces—rhetorically and aesthetically compelling lines of argument— in a style “naturall, and sweet, and grave.” Herbert talks about his preacher as kind rhetorical ideal or mark to aim at.
In a way, Herbert participates in an ongoing dialogue about the role rhetoric plays in instruction broadly speaking. Roger Ascham’s Scholemaster is one of the many texts that outlines the type of teacher that was sorely needed in the Renaissance, not least because a young student at that time, according to Ascham, “lacketh teaching, he lacketh coraging, he lacketh all thinges, onelie he neuer lacketh beating.”61 Elsewhere, Ascham summarizes
59 Fish, “‘Void of Storie,’” 153–54. 60 For the idea that “the speaker turns educator” in epideictic oratory, see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric, 51. See also my discussion in chapter one above. 61 Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 191. 116 his educational program:
I wish to haue them speake so, as may well appeare, that the braine doth gouerne the tonge, and that reason leadeth forth the taulke. Socrates doctrine is true in Plato, and well marked, and truely vttered by Horace in Arte Poetica, that, where so euer knowledge doth accompanie the witte, there best vtterance doth alwaies awaite vpon the tonge: For, good vnderstanding must first be bred in the childe, which, being nurished with skill, and vse of writing (as I will teach more largelie hereafter) is the onelie waie to bring him to iudgement and readinesse in speakinge: and that in farre shorter time (if he followe constantlie the trade of this litle lesson) than he shall do, by common teachinge of the comon scholes in England.62
Ascham pays due homage to Plato’s privileging of the wit here, but the key phrase is
“nourished with skill.” What Ascham describes is less like Socratic elenchus and more like
Isocratean philosophia, a training in speech, in logos, that forms the discursive basis grounding a student’s naturally occurring practical wisdom (phronesis) molded by a habitual bearing (hexis).
In fact, in his tour de force defense of his teaching method, Antidosis, Isocrates summarizes his approach in a quite similar manner:
Now that you have a brief sketch of philosophy [Isocrates’ educational program, or philosophia], I think you would learn its power better if I rehearse the claims I make to those who wish to study with me. I tell them that those who are going to excel in oratory, or public affairs, or any other profession must first have a natural talent for what they have chosen to do; then, they must be educated and gain knowledge of that particular subject; and third, they must practice and become familiar with its use and its implementation (empeiria). After this, whatever the profession, they will become accomplished and far outstrip others. Both teachers and students have their own parts to play: in particular, the pupils’ responsibility is to bring the requisite natural ability, and the teachers’, to be able to educate these kind of students, but common to both is practical experience (empeiria). Teachers must meticulously oversee their students; students must resolutely follow what they have been
62 Ascham, 185–86. 117 taught.63
Isocrates’ philosophia or logon paideia, “discourse education,” differs fundamentally from the paideia of the hermeneutic or philological kind that developed later and was taken up by humanist pedagogy.
Training in logos, for Isocrates, is both a “nurturer of skill” and of wisdom, meant to enable the skillful deployment of speech in the practical situations that citizens encounter. This was accomplished through repeated experience in speaking. As Walker explains, “Isocrates’ paideia was meant to cultivate the student’s capacities through repeated practical experiences (empeiria) over a period of years, not through the narration of a doctrine.”64 Like the parson’s character, a novel mode of being that “Hermogenes never dream’d of, and therefore he could give no precepts thereof,” the cultivation of a good reputation or opinions of oneself (doxa), for Isocrates, rests on skill and repeated practice in public declamation. Repeated, prolonged immersion in the kind of discourse that would enable the cultivation of wisdom requires epideixis, examples of skillful speech performed by the teacher or, in Herbert’s case, the preacher.65
In brief, we can see the importance of the practical example in teaching both parsons how to preach and students how to write and speak: in order to move an audience and gain a good reputation, speakers must demonstrate speech that shows evidence of having been “nourished with skill.” In public devotional contexts, one demonstration text
63 Isocrates, Antidosis 186-188. 64 Walker, Genuine Teachers of This Art, 92. 65 Walker, 81. 118 can be found in the “naturall, sweet, and grave” rhetoric of scripture adequately communicated by the preacher.
In private and semipublic devotional contexts, I argue below, poetry has this same ability to act as training in devotional speech—as Ascham would put it, like the student’s
“vse of writing,” the use of poetry is a “waie to bring him to iudgement and readinesse in speakinge.” It is Herbert’s focus on authoritative—like liturgy, “legitimized”— devotionally effective speech that bridges the gap between the seeming inwardness of The
Temple and its public, performative role as a devotional text.
EPIDEICTIC PERFORMATIVITY IN THE TEMPLE Herbert himself makes the connection between public discourse and his ostensibly private lyrics in The Temple’s introductory poem, “The Church-porch.” The “precepts”66 that make up “The Church-porch” are, as I see it, preparation for acts of worshipful discourse, examples of which are found later in the sequence of lyrics that comprise “The
Church.”
The first stanza of the “The Church-porch” is a masterful act of positioning his
66 In addition to the referencing the Vulgate term for the lintel of the temple in Exodus, Herbert is likely referring to the “Ten Precepts,” or the Ten Commandments. 119 audience, and it also speaks to the aim of his poetics:
Thou, whose sweet youth and early hopes inhance Thy rate and price, and mark thee for a treasure; Hearken unto a Verser, who may chance Ryme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure. A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies, And turn delight into a sacrifice. (1-6)
The most quoted lines of Herbert are, in fact, the concluding couplet of this first stanza.
This references the transformation of God’s delight, his beloved son (filius delectus), into a sacrifice on the cross.67 But in these lines Herbert also foregrounds the Renaissance concern about the use of verse and its ability to teach and to delight. Like a sermon,
Herbert’s poetry is often didactic. But the process by which he educates his readership is achieved by a calculated and strategic use of poetic language. Herbert is “sacrificing,” or transforming, what we might call “merely” delightful poetry into spiritual, pedagogical labor.
This is quite a substantial task for a humble “verser”—Herbert seems hesitant to call himself a poet. The terms “poet” and “verser” were similar, though not synonymous, in the Renaissance. “Verser” is the humbler of the two, and this could indeed be an instance of priestly-aristocratic sprezzatura, dissembling poetry of immense brilliance and obvious labor behind a humble, “simple” sacrificial act. Herbert, in other words, is polite, a verser
“who may chance / Rhyme thee to good” by making “a bait of pleasure.”
One might at first categorize this poem as exemplifying the Renaissance humanist
67 Janis Lull, The Poem in Time: Reading George Herbert’s Revisions of The Church (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 55. 120 ideal of the poet who “baits” the unassuming reader into interpreting poetic-allegorical truths, moving the reader “toward more universal conceptualizations” that appeal to the
“humanist temperament and turn of mind and emphasized the usefulness . . . of the Platonic concept of Form while making it seductive and persuasive through rhetorical patternings.”68
Except this is not what Herbert is doing. I think Herbert embraces “verser” here in the sense of “versifier,” which can be a pejorative for “lesser poet,” but could also denote verse as the mere “craft” of versifying. Ben Jonson, for instance, called the devotional poet
Du Bartas (pejoratively) not “a Poet but a Verser, because he wrote not fiction.”69 Herbert, the “English David,” however, is unconcerned with communicating truth primarily by means of fiction, but rather “plainly” by means of psalm-like, terse lyrics. Like a sermon or a psalm, Herbert’s subject matter is often not fictional in the strictest sense—and here
Herbert may come close to the ancient definition of poetry as “metered prose.”70
Rivkah Zim, in her study of the English metrical psalm movement, notes the impact psalm translation had on early Protestant poetics:
By the later sixteenth century, the vogue for metrical psalms had helped to establish a new decorum for Protestant poetics. The contrast between the ironies and self- contradictions of the sonneteer on the one hand, and the psalmist’s expression of truth in a direct yet artful colloquy with God on the other, became an issue in
68 Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 34. 69 Ben Jonson, The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1.133. 70 For poetry as prose rendered in metrical form, see my discussion of Gorgias in chapter one. See also my discussion of Aristotle’s definition of poetry and what he sees as the mislabeling of the philosophers and historians who write in verse as “poets,” as well as my discussion of Sidney’s similar assertion that “verse is no cause to poetry” in chapter two. 121 Sidney’s poetry: what constitutes a stylistic decorum for Truth.
Zim observes that this same problem arises in Herbert’s poetry, and she finds the solution in the following lines, from “Jordan (II),” which echo Sidney: “There is in love a sweetnesse readie penn’d / Copy out only that, and save expense” (17-18). “This
‘sweetness,’” for Herbert, as Zim observes, is in the Bible, as Herbert makes clear in “The
H. Scriptures (I): “Oh Book! Infinite Sweetnesse! let my heart / Suck ev’ry letter” (1-2).71
Scripture is an inspiration not only for spirituality but as a source of rhetorical
“sweetnesse.” Like Herbert’s parson, the poet imitates the “readie penn’d” energetic/enargetic discourse of scripture, amplifying and rendering in verse the commonplaces and lines of argument found there. Here the poet must be a verser because he does not write fiction; he instead crafts a formalized colloquy with God.
In this sense, the “conflict” between Herbert and God speaks to the status of
Herbert’s poetry as non-fictional “lyric argument:” “The Church-porch” is indeed an argument in a kind of “metered prose.” As Richard Strier has pointed out, this poem is a series of moral precepts in verse, a versified equivalent of Francis Bacon’s “councils, civil and moral.”72 On this point, though, I believe we can again compare Herbert with
Puttenham. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Puttenham turns to anecdotes of courtly speech because, with “decency,” or decorum, “there be sundry sorts of discretion all unlike,” and it is difficult to fully capture these with precepts. While much has been written
71 Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535-1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 205. 72 Strier, “Sanctifying the Aristocracy,” 45. 122 about how Puttenham approaches poetry as a practical art that “resists theory,”73 how he approaches what we would today call rhetorical situations is particularly noteworthy. Most importantly, he observes the variable nature of decency:
This decency, so far forth as appertaineth to the consideration of our art, resteth in writing, speech, and behavior. But because writing is no more than the image or character of speech, they shall go together in these our observations. And first we will sort you out divers points, in which the wise and learned men of times past have noted much decency or indecency, every man according to his discretion, as it hath been said afore, but wherein for the most part all discreet men do generally agree and vary not in opinion, whereof the examples I will give you be worthy of remembrance. And though they brought with them no doctrine or institution at all, yet for the solace they may give the readers, after such a rabble of scholastical precepts, which be tedious, these reports being of the nature of matters historical, they are to be embraced.
Like Herbert’s sequence of lyrics in “The Church” that follow the precepts of “The Church- porch,” after a “rabble of scholastical precepts” Puttenham turns to practical examples, gathered both from his own experience and from historical examples of successful speech and behavior. Both are more instructive and more delightful to the reader because they are of the “nature of matters historical”—meaning more artfully composed than precepts—and are therefore not explicitly prescriptive or doctrinal. He continues:
But old memories are very profitable to the mind, and serve as a glass to look upon and behold the events of time, and more exactly to scan the truth of every case that shall happen in the affairs of man. And many there be that haply do not observe every particularity in matters of decency or indecency, and yet when the case is told them by another man, they commonly give the same sentence upon it. But yet whosoever observeth much shall be counted the wisest and discreetest man, and whosoever spends all his life in his own vain actions and conceits, and observes no man’s else, he shall in the end prove but a simple man. In which respect it is always said, one man of experience is wiser than ten learned men, because of his long and
73 See Kahn, “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory”; Attridge, “Puttenham’s Perplexity: Nature, Art, and the Supplement in Renaissance Poetic Theory,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia A. Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 257–79. 123 studious observation and often trial.74
It is telling, then, that in “Superliminare,” a kind of short preface placed between
“The Church-porch” and the main sequence of lyrics that make up “The Church,” Herbert states the following:
Thou, whom the former precepts have Sprinkled and taught, how to behave Thy self in church; approach, and taste The churches mysticall repast.
Again, what is clear is that this is no private meditation, nor does it concern or dramatize private meditation. It deals instead with a setting of communal worship. Stanley Fish would see this as evidence of Herbert acting as catechist. While I do not agree with his assessment of Herbert’s rhetoric as dialectical and “Socratean,” I do think Fish makes a crucial point, that the “distinction between poet and persona need not be made if Herbert is understood to be speaking in his own pedagogical voice.”75 But Herbert’s pedagogy and rhetoric is not
Socratean, I would argue, but Isocratean.
In a recent rhetorical study of prayer, William FitzGerald claims that “[a]t the heart of prayer is the relationship between devotional acts and their dispositions.” He explains that the performance of prayer is as “important as semantic content and purpose”—“what really matters” most of the time “is how prayer is performed. It must be undertaken in the proper spirit and executed with care.” The difficulty of prayer, according to FitzGerald, stems from the need to align “heart and lips,” otherwise one is just paying God “lip
74 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 349–50. 75 Fish, “Catechizing the Reader: Herbert’s Socratean Rhetoric,” in The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry: From Wyatt to Milton, ed. Thomas O. Sloane and Raymond B. Waddington (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 178. 124 service.”76
FitzGerald and the early modern theorists of devotion both, I think, come to similar conclusions about the nature of prayerful rhetoric. FitzGerald cites the writings of the modern Protestant theologian Karl Barth as an example of the privileging of disposition over act, that insincere prayer is “useless” and “offensive to God.” For FitzGerald, such a view is peculiarly modern, as it “unmistakably gives primacy to intention over form, sprit over letter.” Barth, according to FitzGerald, “does not entertain even the possibility that form itself may take the lead through its instructive effect on the heart.” To this end,
FitzGerald argues that prayer involves a
two-way circulation between heart and lips, attitude and act. In my two-way model, acts invariably communicate, even betray, an attitude, but the reverse is equally true. Acts form attitudes. The complementary relations of acts and attitudes are evident in prayer as a domain where habit and character are fused. As a technology of spiritual transformation, prayer seeks to become what it performs, recognizing that only through performance is transformation achievable.77
As spiritual “technology,” prayer acts as a rhetorical techne, an art that produces a devotional habit of being, or strategic “attitude,” through the production, in turn, of discourse—“attitude” understood here in the Burkean sense of a motive that prepares one for action.78
Similarly, Herbert acts out in his lyrics attitudes that would prepare his reader for action in rhetorical situations that require devotional speech. If readers encounter such
76 William FitzGerald, Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012), 74. 77 FitzGerald, 75. 78 FitzGerald, 7; Burke, Permanence and Change, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 29. 125 situations, they can, having encountered and internalized Herbert’s verses, redeploy them.
As “common prayer,” The Temple functions as an expression of a “scene of address,”79 a representation of situations where devotional speech is required, and also as an epideictic demonstration of worshipful attitudes acted out for the benefit of the reader.
What is also important to note is that, again like the psalms, Herbert often poses problems about devotional speech in devotional speech. Herbert presents devotional speech as the most proper discourse in which to articulate such problems, and concentrates on devotional “language about language.”80 But the form in which Herbert writes also implies a potential solution: as ritual artifacts, his lyrics are meant to be reperformed. By their very formal execution, that is, Herbert’s poetry also brings into being rhetorical situations—situations that have rhetorical exigence and that require their own poetic
“arguments” to “solve.” Herbert’s poems become their own events, and they foreground this aspect of his poetry through what Attridge would call the “eventness” of lyric form, or what Perelman would call techniques of presence.
This, I believe, is one of the meanings of that Herbert has in mind when he talks of turning a “delight into a sacrifice.” His poetry indeed has connections to the “wit” of metaphysical poetics and to the intertextuality and aristocratic social norms of coterie verse; poems that are markedly witty or aesthetically delightful are able to become proper
79 FitzGerald, Spiritual Modalities, 8. 80 See Charney, Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2017), 2–3: “As intricately wrought poetry, the psalms are, if anything, even more highly focused on persuasion than the rest of the Bible, bringing to bear all the enchantments of sound and form. The psalms are suffused with terms connected to language: the speech organs, the varieties of vocal utterances and the goals of speech.” 126 objects of critical fascination and admiration in these settings. As a “sacrifice,” however, his poetry becomes mere “verse,” written by a “verser” who intends for his poems to serve a practical, devotional purpose.
It is not surprising then that Herbert foregrounds the problem of the efficacy of devotional rhetoric in many places in The Temple, though perhaps nowhere as significantly as in “The Windows.” A poem central to The Temple, one of the few that references the
“temple” metaphor of its title, it begins by contextualizing where and by what means a priest’s devotionally effective speech occurs:
Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word? He is a brittle crazie glasse: Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace. (1-5)
Rosemond Tuve argued long ago that Herbert finds in the “windows” metaphor a
“traditional central invention or imaginative similitude” into which he “bores down” to uncover “new veins of meaning.”81 What I wish to focus on, in addition to the richness of this metaphor, is how Herbert’s own poem here portrays “eventness.” He achieves this in part by the apostrophic opening, which echoes his discussion of apostrophe in The Country
Parson: one could easily imagine this metaphor used in a sermon (for all we know, Herbert did use it). Culler would argue that this is also an example of “triangulated address,” a poem addressed both to a deity and to the audience. The apostrophe also functions as a
Perelmanian technique of presence. It makes the poem’s argument that much more evident,
81 Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 153. 127 and, as a “ritualistic” utterance, it transforms the poem into a speech-event, able to addresses a wider audience of poetic “congregants” who are, like a preacher, anxious about the effectiveness of their devotional rhetoric.82 “The Windows” is at once both localizable to Herbert and generalizable to his audience. It is in this glorious and transcendent place, the English Church and The Temple, that he and his audience must show skill in speaking.
Herbert’s situation is both personal and typical.
This typicality makes the poem relevant not only to other preachers, but to any who might want to formulate the problem in Herbert’s way. “The Windows,” in other words, addresses what Burke would call a “type situation,” which he defines as a representative case of one of the many social situations involving “competitive and cooperative acts.”83
Acting as “proverbs writ large,” works of literature encapsulate and name “strategies for handling” situations by identifying certain attitudes that allow the reader to deal with a situation “strategically”84—“inspirational literature,” for example, is a “strategy for easy consolation.”85 Such “sociological criticism,” as proposed by Burke, “derives its relevance from the fact that it should apply both to works of art and to situations outside of art.”86
What makes Burke’s approach particularly relevant to Herbert (or to any lyric sequence or collection) is that it requires an “inspection of the lot” for contradictions, or attitudes held in tension.87 This approach accepts that contrary attitudes exist in a unified
82 Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 206. See also Culler, “Apostrophe,” Diacritics 7, no. 4 (1977): 59–69. 83 Burke, “Equipment for Living,” 293–94. 84 Burke, 296–97. 85 Burke, 298. 86 Burke, 303. 87 Burke, 304. 128 poetic work, as they do in proverbs and psalms, because they might identify different strategies for dealing with the different situations they address.88 Thus Herbert, who in
“The Windows” is confident that God will allow his perfect grace to “shine” through him imperfectly as light through a window, can elsewhere beg that same deity to “Kill me not ev’ry day, / Thou Lord of life” (“Affliction” [II] 1-2), which is petitioning of a decidedly different nature, one of the many variable relations with God that, for all Christians, may range from intimate to agonistic (and even paradoxical or contradictory).
Unlike “Affliction” (II), “The Windows” shows Herbert’s relationship with God to be mutually beneficial, and Herbert offers strategic discourse for how to conceptualize, using its central figure, ways in which devotional speech may in fact be effective in
88 Burke, 297. I consider Burke’s account of contradiction to be more applicable to Herbert than Empson’s in his classic essay on Herbert’s “Sacrifice.” Burke is focused more on the psychological resolution of inner conflict, where Empson is concerned with the paradoxical “vengeful God of love” dramatized in one of Herbert’s (few) monologues: “Herbert's poems are usually more ‘personal’ and renaissance than this one, in which the theological system is accepted so completely that the poet is only its mouthpiece. Perhaps this, as a releasing and reassuring condition, is necessary if so high a degree of ambiguity is to seem normal. For, to this extent, the poem is outside the ‘conflict’ theory of poetry; it assumes, as does its theology, the existence of conflicts, but its business is to state a generalised solution of them.” Seven Types of Ambiguity, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1966), 226–27. However, I also think that Empson’s remark about Paradise Lost, that it is both “horrible and wonderful,” also applies to Herbert’s poetry: it investigates what it really means to submit to a God who can in fact be “downright horrible,” and which results in the inevitable “moral confusions” that are fascinating to modern critics. See Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 276, 13. 129 communicating God’s message:
But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie, Making thy life to shine within The holy Preachers; then the light and glorie More rev’rend grows, & more doth win: Which else shows watrish, bleak, & thin. Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one When they combine and mingle, bring A strong regard and aw: but speech alone Doth vanish like a flaring thing, And in the eare, not conscience ring. (6-15)
This paints a recognizable picture. Augustine, who informed so much of Reformation theology, puts it the following way: “Let not thy voice alone sound the praises of God, but let thy works also be in harmony with thy voice.”89 Herbert here seems to restate the problem that arises from this, that only God can truly know if one has linked the appearance of holiness to actual holiness. Herbert is astute enough to know that social performances are not innately connected to inner states of being and therefore can be performed by anyone skilled enough in speaking. Moreover, as was the case with Puttenham’s mental conceits, the spirit, like metal (“mettle”), is malleable. This unnerving intuition is what lies behind the dissonance in “The Windows” that arises from its being both optimistic instruction and a cautionary example, as well as from the text’s constant assertion that
“seeming” be joined to “being”90—here we seem to have again the problem of sincerity.
Yet a solution is suggested by Herbert in “Affliction” (IV).
“Affliction” (IV) is a disturbing poem—one where spiritual anxiety amounts to a
89Augustine, Expositions on the Book of the Psalms, ed. A. Cleveland Coxe (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1956), 665. 90 Malcolmson, Heart-Work, 43. 130 kind of psychological torture. Herbert’s thoughts, for instance, are a “case of knives, wounding [his] heart” (7-8). Yet he finds solace in the fact that future relief will come: his thoughts will enter the service of God, and he will “day by day, / Labour thy praise, and my relief” (27-28). Earlier in the poem he notes that the torment that visits him nightly is resolved by morning, when his work begins. As he puts it, “As the sunne scatters by his light / All the rebellions of the night. / Then shall those powers, which work for grief, /
Enter thy pay” (23-26). This looks back to the figure of stained-glass in “The Windows,” and the idea that speech praising God is only effective if doctrine is joined to life. Herbert here suggests that this is a circle that feeds back upon itself: the act of divinely inspired praise reorients the psyche—one could even call it going through the motions, or “fake it till you make it”—in such a way that it results in real change. Devotional speech repays
God with praise for honoring the “contract,” so to speak, by giving us the ability, in a somewhat circular fashion, to “[e]nter thy pay.”
More to the point, however, is that, much like FitzGerald’s “two-way” rhetoric of prayer, this is an ancient conception of rhetoric that goes back to Gorgias’ Helen. Ford explains:
Gorgias suggests that persuasion is a rather physical, automatic process by comparing it with drugs: the power of speech to affect the ‘arrangement’ (taxis) of the soul is analogous to the way a selection or ‘arrangement’ (taxis) of drugs affects the physical structures of the body . . . . The repetition of taxis (“drawing into formation, arrangement”) in complementary senses in each half of the analogy implies that the ordering of the elements composing a speech will have a determining effect on the constitution of the soul. In such cases, the taxis or
131 organization of elements is being impressed on the hearer, not truth.”91
A speaker guides the audience toward a new state of being by reordering the self, bringing about a change in its organization. This is, in part, what Herbert means by his praise entering God’s pay. This act is both an end and a means to that end, and is evidence of change because it brings about change. This poem acts similarly to the psalms, as a kind of argument for the worthiness of the speaker.92 Herbert also, though, makes evident to his audience the means by which he is able to perceive the evidence of his worthiness, through the emotional resolution that the very composition—and implicitly the rehearsal—of speech the poem provides.
This is a rhetorical effect, a tacit argument for assurance; “The Windows” and poems like it are a means for both poet and reader to “unburden” themselves, as Burke would put it.93 Despite Cranmer’s formalizing of liturgy and Archbishop Laud’s beautifying of holiness, assurance in matters of salvation was in short supply during
Herbert’s time, as R. T. Kendall’s study of English predestinarianism argues.94 The
Temple’s most important function, then, might simply have been its presentation of a reassuring reality, one where discourse is effective in the daily conflicts between oneself
91Ford, Origins of Criticism, 180. 92Charney, “Performativity and Persuasion,” 263. 93 Burke, “Philosophy of Literary Form,” 92. 94 R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 132 and God, and where, as a Christian, one has some degree of agency in such matters.95
“CHURCH-MUSICK”: THE TEMPLE AND PUBLIC DEVOTION AFTER THE RESTORATION A great deal of guesswork is involved in conceiving the role Herbert’s lyrics might have played in devotional settings during his lifetime, before they were published and were more widely read. What we know is that Herbert was not a stranger to performance: he was an accomplished player of the viol, and there is evidence that Herbert sang his poems at family events, at gatherings Salisbury, and, possibly, at Nicholas Ferrar’s Anglican community at Little Gidding.96 We have much better documentation, however, about how
The Temple was used in similarly public and semipublic forums for worship in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These are important contexts for considering the performative qualities of Herbert’s poetry, and before concluding this chapter I wish to touch very briefly on the fascinating history of the reception of Herbert’s poetry in this post-Restoration period.
95 Agency in salvation was itself a controversial matter; the church under Laud moved in a distinctly Arminian direction. Ferrar was an Arminian and Herbert might very well have been one. See Tyacke, Anti- Calvinists, 190. For an argument against Herbert’s Arminianism, see Gene E. Veith’s studies on Herbert and Anglicanism: Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert (London: Bucknell University Press, 1985), 117–32; “The Religious Wars in George Herbert Criticism: Reinterpreting Seventeenth-Century Anglicanism,” George Herbert Journal 11, no. 2 (1988): 19–35; “‘Brittle Crazy Glass’: George Herbert, Vocation, and the Theology of Presence,” in George Herbert’s Pastoral: New Essays on the Poet and Priest of Bemerton, ed. Christopher Hodgkins (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), 52–71. Achsah Guibbory, on the other hand, argues that Herbert was equivocal on the matter, while John M. Adrian contends that Herbert was simply not interested in matters beyond his authority as priest. See Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Adrian, “George Herbert, Parish ‘Dexterity’, and the Local Modification of Laudianism,” The Seventeenth Century 24, no. 1 (2009): 26–51. 96 Charles, “George Herbert: Priest, Poet, Musician,” Journal of the Viola Da Gamba Society of America 4 (1967): 32. 133 In his Life of Mr. George Herbert, Walton gives us the following description of the kind of worship that went on at Little Gidding:
[Ferrar] being accompanied with most of his Family, did himself use to read the Common prayers (for he was a Deacon) every day at the appointed hours of Ten and Four . . . . And, he did also constantly read the Mattins every Morning at the hour of six, either in the Church, or in an Oratory, which was within his own House: And many of the Family did there continue with him after the Prayers were ended, and there spent some hours in singing Hymns, or Anthems, sometimes in the Church, and often to an Organ in the Oratory. And, there they sometimes betook themselves to meditate, or to pray privately, or to read a part of the New Testament to themselves, or to continue their praying or reading of the Psalms . . . . And it is to be noted, that in this continued serving of God, the Psalter, or the whole Book of Psalms, was in every four and twenty hours, sung and read over, from the first to the last verse: and, this was done as constantly as the Sun runs his circle every day about the World, and then begins again the same instant that it ended.
“Thus,” Walton concludes, “did Mr. Ferrer, and his happy Family, serve God day and night.”97 Again, Walton’s account probably exaggerates the level of piety here—perhaps, like Herbert’s country parson, this is a “mark to aim at,” an ideal meant to incite imitation.
Even if that is the case, Walton accurately describes the practices of semi-public devotion, even if such devotion was likely not performed as strenuously as he indicates.
Devotional poetry like Herbert’s, especially if sung like hymns or anthems, would fit in well with such practices. After Herbert’s death, there were no fewer than “fifty-three arrangements of twenty-four different poems by Herbert,” as Amy M. Charles has documented. And, according to Charles, it is the style of Herbert’s poems that appealed to those looking for devotional texts to set to music: “Herbert’s delight in developing a variety of stanzaic patternings is probably the reason that his poems are more readily adaptable as
97 Walton, Life of Mr. George Herbert, 317–18. 134 anthems or for solo voice but are more difficult to fit the patterns of hymn tunes in common, long, or short meter.”98
Yet Herbert was adapted into common meter, as Wilcox has shown, by the
Dissenters of the late seventeenth century. Like the imitations of Herbert by radicals during the Civil War period, non-Anglicans of the late seventeenth century continued to find use for Herbert’s lyrics because there was an “awareness of, even an assumption of, musical qualities in his verse.” Indeed, “like the original Psalms, Herbert’s poems were regarded as material to be sung.”99 Herbert’s lyrics were first adapted for this purpose by the anonymous author of Select Hymns Taken out of Mr. Herbert’s Temple (1697), a text that was influential in the development of the eighteenth-century English hymn.100
In the preface, it is explained that Herbert has “obtain’d by way of Eminency, the
Name of Our Divine Poet, and his Verses have been frequently quoted in Sermons and other Discourses; yet, I fear, few of them have been Sung since his Death, the Tunes not being at the Command of ordinary Readers.101 Wilcox cites the last clause as possible evidence that the written musical accompaniment to which Herbert set his poems, noted by
Walton as being lost during the Civil War, indeed existed, or at least that there was a tradition of setting Herbert’s poems to music shortly after his death.102 In any case, the
98 Charles, “George Herbert: Priest, Poet, Musician,” 34. 99 Wilcox, “Exploring the Language of Devotion in the English Revolution,” in Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Thomas F. Healy and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 80– 81; see also “‘The Sweet Singer of the Temple’: The Musicians’ Response to Herbert,” George Herbert Journal 10, no. 1 (1986): 47–48. 100 See William E. Stephenson’s introduction to the facsimile edition of Select Hymns Taken out of Mr. Herbert’s Temple (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), i. 101 Select Hymns, A2. 102 Wilcox, “The Sweet Singer of the Temple,” 48. 135 adapter of Select Hymns makes it clear that those who only read Herbert’s lyrics miss a crucial quality of his verse, one which the author tries to recapture by setting Herbert’s poems to the meter and to the music to which the hymns and psalms were traditionally set.
Brian Vickers, in his rhetorical study of musical figuration, states that in “early humanist praises of the power of music the proper ‘accommodation’ of verba to res seems to have an enormous emotional impact attributed to it, which is sometimes described with the help of another rhetorical category, that of vividness or visual intensity.”103 I think what those who use Herbert in musical contexts find, however, is something much closer to
Puttenham’s auricular interpretation of enargeia, figuration fit “to satisfy and delight the ear only by a goodly outward show . . . with words and speeches smoothly and tunably running.”104 It is the “tunable” aspects of Herbert’s poetry—as much, if not more than its witty visual conceits—that contributed to its staying power, whether quoted in “Sermons and other Discourses,” or sung in the devotional settings of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As Wilcox observes, “[t]he aims of The Temple with respect to its human readership are precisely those of an oration: to teach, delight, persuade, and move.
By means of its aesthetic pleasure, a poem is seen to be more successful—and closer to the nature of a good oration—even than a sermon.”105 And, I would argue, it is as a text that exemplifies devotional attitudes in poetic action that inspired The Temple’s afterlife as a
103 Vickers, “Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 2, no. 1 (1984): 11. 104 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 227. See also my discussion of Puttenham’s auricular figures and their relation to epideixis in the previous chapter. 105 Wilcox, “Herbert’s ‘Enchanting Language’: The Poetry of a Cambridge Orator,” George Herbert Journal 27, no. 1 (2003): 60. 136 source for non-conformist hymns, another instance where Herbert verse was put to use and, in this case, modified. What is important here is that these later adapters saw Herbert not so much as an author of a canonical work, but as an authoritative and highly gifted crafter of verse that had uses beyond artistic appreciation. The “tunableness” of his lyrics is, again, the figural mechanism by which Herbert’s poetry was once more able to fulfill its role as an epideictic “script.” As Select Hymns demonstrates, it is the “music” of Herbert’s verse that continued to inspire admiration, imitation, and performance.
CONCLUSION To summarize, though he indeed seeks to communicate passions that evoke timeless and immutable Christian truths, Herbert uses a method that has much more in common with what I am calling performative poetics. Herbert can more easily be placed in the performative tradition of Puttenham than in the paideutic tradition of Sidney or Scott.
This is not to say that Herbert had no pedagogical aims, but rather that the way that Herbert approached his educational “duty” as a poet-priest was through a performance of eloquence that was neither the Neoplatonic, hermeneutic poetics of Sidney nor, as I will argue in the next chapter, its recapitulation in the analytical rhetoric of Donne. Instead, Herbert uses to his advantage the ways in which devotional verse can work in a manner similar to the public, occasional, and situational art of prayer, inviting his reader to participate in the performance of devotional argument.
It is clear that the staying power of Herbert’s poetry—why it was read, recited, and sung in the centuries after his death, and why we read it today—is also the result of
137 Herbert’s ability to capture in precise and striking detail the diversity of spiritual experience. It is this range of experience, what Charles calls Herbert’s “protest, rising from experience of human frailty, bereavement, and defenselessness” that so captivates.106 I would add to this list Herbert’s (and our) delight in consolation. That is, how Herbert seeks to resolve by practical application of discourse the conflicts and conflicting situations, or
“attitudes,” that arise from Christian—indeed, human—life. That many are captivated in such a way by verse is something that should be better accounted for in studies of Herbert’s lyrics and of lyric poetry more broadly speaking.
This chapter has been an attempt to find a rhetorical explanation for why we are so captivated. By stating up front his poetry’s relevance to the religious experience of the average English churchgoer, Herbert makes explicit in his poetry the “ritual,” “liturgical,” or “ceremonial” form of lyric that is often overlooked. Herbert’s formalized “expressions of faith, doubt, hope, and praise” were able to carry out their devotional purpose because we, his audience, are incited to apply their arguments in similar situations.
Like Lewis’s description of the secular liturgy of the sonnet, this rhetorical exchange—which I have argued constitutes a kind of rhetorical training in devotional speech—depends on Herbert’s readership understanding that his lyrics are not necessarily biographical, nor are they necessarily fictional, but are instead instances of formalized discourse that envision a shared reality. Herbert’s poems act both as ceremonial utterance and incitement to ceremonial utterance. In this case, Herbert offers in poetic form a priest’s
106 Charles, Life of George Herbert, 86. 138 articulation of this reality, made evident to his audience in publicized, prayerful discourse, and made available to be rearticulated in speech by that audience.
Herbert uses poetry, in short, as a means by which to formulate and address problems of rhetorical invention as it relates to devotional discourse: finding words with which to worship, to encapsulate devotional situations, or to petition the divine in a devotional, epideictic “rhetorical poetics” of common prayer. The Temple, in this sense, functions analogously to a techne, offering a spiritual handbook that provides examples of and tactics for effective rhetoric. Herbert, I argue, sees the artistry of devotional speech as training similar to that found in Isocratean logon paideia: building a repertoire of common lines of argument gleaned from successful speech by having that speech refashioned or imitated by a “student”—training the reader, in this case, into a rhetorical facility (dunamis) that molds an ethical, worshipful habit of being (hexis).
This process is, at its core, performative; Herbert’s concern is not to create a good reader or a good citizen per se, but rather to create a good Christian who speaks eloquently to and about the divine. This chapter has argued that it is in this rhetorical way that
Herbert’s Temple participates in the discursive situations of the early seventeenth-century
Church. I follow Burke here, who describes his critical method as one that “assumes that the poem is designed to ‘do something’ for the poet and his readers, and that we can make the most relevant observations about [a poem’s] design by considering the poem as the embodiment of this act.”107
107 Burke, “Philosophy of Literary Form,” 89. 139 I also consider Herbert’s poetry an example of how lyric in the early modern period fails to conform to the Romantic presumptions about poetry’s being a dramatization of expression. To the degree they are expressive artifacts, Herbert’s poems express the attitudes most conducive to devotional action by an audience. Herbert presents his devotional eloquence as a craft, a productive art. It is therefore the way in which Herbert exemplifies poetic skill that he is also able to attend to the practical, rhetorical needs of his readership, and in doing so be of use to any “dejected and poor soul.”
140 Chapter Four: John Donne Is Not a Sophist: Paideutic Poetics and Useful Obscurity in the Holy Sonnets
INTRODUCTION John Donne’s poetry exists—and has existed for some time—in a somewhat beleaguered state. A relatively common approach in modern criticism has been to acknowledge Donne’s intellectual power and poetic genius while at the same time admitting that one finds his commitments—to truth, to religion, to love—suspect. What
Empson once called the “mean-mindedness” of Donne’s critics, it seems, has persisted in present-day scholarship.1 As Targoff has recently observed, it is “difficult to find critics or readers who consider Donne’s career without impugning his motives and accusing him of bad faith. The sentiments of the love poems are discounted, while the religious poems are often regarded as theologically confused and sophistic.”2
Such attitudes derive in part from Donne’s deliberate use of ambiguity and paradox, a rhetorical strategy pervasive in Renaissance verse (and a poetic practice that Herbert also participated in).3 As we have seen, critics tend to find tedious this kind of “ransacking” of nature and art, as Johnson put it, for “illustrations, comparisons, and allusions.” Except for
Coleridge, who found in Donne’s verse a source of stylistic innovation, the Romantics had
1 Empson, “Rescuing Donne,” in Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 1, Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 159. 2 Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5. 3 The seminal study of Renaissance paradox is Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). For Donne’s use of paradox, see also Geoffery Bullough, “Donne the Man of Law,” in Just So Much Honor: Essays Commemorating the Four- Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of John Donne, ed. Peter Amadeus Fiore (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1972), 57–94. 141 little patience for Donne’s intellectual abstruseness and “by and large rebelled against his intellectual language and difficult conceits.”4 In the twentieth century, Eliot called Donne’s poetry a “vast jumble of incoherent erudition on which he drew for purely poetic effects.”5
Biester, a more recent and much more sympathetic reader of Donne, still describes Donne’s poetic style as “shattered by commas.”6 For even the most avid critic, Donne is simply difficult.
For the Renaissance reader, though, obscurity was a mark of distinction. A. Alvarez notes in his classic study that the presumption “[t]hat poetry was necessarily obscure was reaffirmed continually in Renaissance England, by, for instance, Harington, Sidney, and
Chapman; an exhaustive list would include most of the relatively traditional writers of poetics.” Alvarez gives the example of Chapman deliberately “darkening” his translation of Homer to “put beyond dispute the poet’s dignity.”7 Ben Jonson’s quip, that Donne “for not being understood would perish,” is a kind of backhanded compliment.8
The rhetorical danger of obscurity was well recognized, however, and Renaissance writers also valued perspicuity when appropriate. Sidney, we recall, notes the risk of seeming a “sophister”: one may “obtain an opinion of a seeming finesse, but persuade few.”
In the end, a plain “sensibleness” is what will “win credit of popular ears.”9 Poetry acts,
4 Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, 3. For an extended discussion of Coleridge and Donne, see Michael R. Richards, “The Romantic Critics and John Donne,” The Bucknell Review 25, no. 2 (1980): 40–51. 5 Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 139. 6 Biester, Lyric Wonder, 15. 7 Alvarez, School of Donne, 29–30. 8 Jonson, Works of Ben Jonson, 1.138. 9 Sidney, “Defence of Poetry,” 118. 142 in other words, by being able to unite arcane philosophical doctrine and historical exempla in a way palatable to the (learned) masses.
Yet writing too plainly presented more dangers still. Ignoring the figural richness of poetry meant undermining poetry’s most important function—its ability to teach. A degree of obscurity was understood to play a role in the educative process, as Sidney explains:
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, whereof Aesop’s tales give good proof: whose pretty allegories, stealing under the formal tales of beasts, make many, more beastly than beasts, begin to hear the sound of virtue from these dumb speakers.10
In contrast to the total obscurity of philosophical discourse, poetic obscurity derives from such things as “pretty allegories,” where poetry “imitates only as a means to the proximate end of pleasing, and pleases . . . only as a means to the ultimate end of teaching.”11 Poetic
“deception” is acceptable because the poet “never affirmeth.” Poets write not to create a reality, so Sidney says, but to educate the reader, bringing a moral reality into being—the reader, ideally, becomes a new Cyrus, a paragon of virtue. Poetry is able to accomplish this through the reproduction of a “fore-conceit”—the poetic exemplum of Cyrus combined with the virtues he signifies. The reader must be able to decipher how and why the poet created that example in the way that he did, which means also learning how and why Cyrus represents moral character.
10 Sidney, 87. 11 Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 14. 143 The act of deciphering poetic obscurity, moreover, was seen as a necessary stage in the learning process. John Harington, writing in 1591, borrows from Sidney when he states the following:
[T]he weaker capacities will feed themselves with the pleasantness of the history and the sweetness of the verse; some that have stronger stomachs will, as it were, take a further taste of the moral sense; a third sort, more high conceited than they, will digest the allegory. So it has been thought, by men of every good judgment, such manner of poetical writing was an excellent way to preserve all kinds of learning from that corruption which now it is come to since they left that mystical writing of verse.12
Allegory is the imitative process by which complex and arcane truths may be taught, their being packaged in a figural mechanism that the learned will be able to recognize and understand. Sidney’s “right popular philosopher” is far from democratic, and would be particularly unforgiving to the “weaker capacities” of the audience that Harington describes. This educative process is also a weeding out, adding distinction not only to poetry, but also distinguishing the fit from the unfit.
Donne may seem “sophistic,” or merely rhetorical, or that he is showing off for the sake of showing off.13 But seeing Donne in this way means ignoring how he participates in this broader, paideutic tradition. As Alvin Sullivan argues, Donne’s training in logic
“undoubtedly not only affected his methods of argument, but suggested as well certain sources for the sophistry which critics from Johnson on have hailed or decried as Donne’s wit.” Poems that seem “eccentric” to readers in the twentieth century “would for Donne’s
12 John Harington, “A Brief Apology of Poetry,” in Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 267–68. 13 Margret Fetzer seeks to rehabilitate a “performative” Donne, though she uses the term as defined by ordinary language philosophy in order to compare Donne’s poetry to theatrical performance. See “Plays of Self: Theatrical Performativity in Donne,” in Solo Performances (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 189–205. 144 contemporaries . . . have been more familiar and less eccentric than we presume.”14 Donne, according to Sullivan, wrote in a kind of insider-discourse that reflects the dialectical exercises of the Inns of Court. And, in a seminal article, A. E. Malloch writes that, in the
Songs and Sonets, the “offices of the paradoxes is not to deceive, but by a show of deceit to force the reader to uncover the truth. The true nature of paradox is revealed when the reader overturns it.” Furthermore, “the paradoxes do not really have natures at all; they are nothings. They exist only within the antithetical action of the reader.”15 Again, the poet here “never affirmeth,” but he is still able to teach.
I find less convincing the way James S. Baumlin has extended Malloch’s thesis to include Donne’s religious poetry. According to Baumlin, “[t]hough the youthful Donne offers his Paradoxes as ‘jests’ (thus emphasizing their ludic intent), the mature Donne uses them ‘to arme’ his fellows in the contemporary warfare of religious polemics.”16 Here we seem to have something like a Sidnean pragmatic solution: Donne uses metaphor, paradox and other rhetorical flourishes to bolster the practical judgment and rhetorical facility of his readership. And Baumlin is careful to locate these practices in the humanism Donne and his readers were indoctrinated into: “[w]hereas modern students glaze over at the naming of figures, Donne’s coterie readership grew up with them, memorized them, drilled with them as part of their humanist education.” Thus, according to Baumlin, like a sophist,
14 Alvin Sullivan, “Donne’s Sophistry and Certain Renaissance Books of Logic and Rhetoric,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 22, no. 1 (1982): 107. 15 A. E. Malloch, “The Techniques and Function of the Renaissance Paradox,” Studies in Philology 53, no. 2 (1956): 192. 16 James S. Baumlin, Theologies of Language in English Renaissance Literature: Reading Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 76. 145 Donne’s powers derive “from his mastery of lexis,” but it is in service of something greater than sophistical epideictic: where Jack Donne was a sophistic rake, Dr. Donne used his powers for good.17
Baumlin, in other words, seeks to rehabilitate Donne’s wit by arguing that it served a practical role in deliberation—this is the conventional idea of rhetoric, conceived as a primarily deliberative art. This, I would argue, is a notion of rhetoric particularly unsuited to our understanding of both Donne and the aristocratic poetic practices with which he was engaged. And though I agree for the most part with Baumlin’s assessment of Donne’s audience—he makes the important observation that Donne and his readership shared many of the same assumptions about style—I am hesitant to call the rhetoric on which these assumptions are based “sophistic” in any meaningful sense of the term.18
I want to claim instead that Donne’s poetry, far from being sophistic, makes use of a paideutic conception of poetry and innovates within that paradigm. Paideutic poetics, I have argued, depends on the audience taking a more passive role: it has more in common— indeed, it grew out of—the ancient hermeneutic practices that were reinvigorated by the humanist academy, which advanced a more nuanced type of philological study and, eventually, something like modern literary criticism. Its ultimate goal, though, was the training of citizens: Elyot’s “governors,” men of good morals and good taste. Insofar as
17 Baumlin, 96. 18 As I argue in a previous chapter, a “sophistic” poetics is one that foregrounds performance. Donne’s Anniversaries are considered epideictic by Lewalski, though she understands epideictic in the more traditional sense of a rhetoric of praise and blame. I have described epideictic using Walker’s formulation, a broad performative discourse defined by poetic-rhetorical “prosodic eloquence.” Hardison also explores Donne’s use of epideictic in a manner similar to Lewalski. See Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries; Hardison, Enduring Monument, 163–86. 146 Donne is concerned with being of use to his readership, he sees poetry as he did rhetoric, an instrument of judgment and an analytical tool, which means that Donne foregrounds the
“literary critical” issues of propriety and taste. What is foremost on Donne’s mind is to be interpreted, analyzed, and judged by his audience. It is how Donne uses ambiguity to invite analysis and interpretation that he displays his humanism, and that Donne’s use of wit and paradox exercises practical judgment makes his poetry much less sophistic than it would at first seem.
Again, William Scott’s Model of Poesy is helpful here. Scott defines poetic art not so much as a craft as “a frame and body of rules compacted and digested out of observation and experience, behoveful to some particular good end in our civil life.”19 Training literary judgment means that poetry serves civic and ethical ends, if for no other reason than the fact that the ethical intention of the poet was seen as a kind of efficient cause of good poetry. But this also means that Donne sees poetry on fundamentally different rhetorical terms than an ostensibly similar poet like Herbert, and that he engages with his readership in a much different way. Rhetoric is an instrument of critical analysis for Donne, and he assumes that his audience will understand rhetoric on similar terms. With regard to poetry, at least, Donne’s presumptive audience would view rhetoric as an art of understanding, not invention.
19 Scott, Model of Poesy, 7. 147 “THAT MYSTICAL WRITING OF VERSE”: DONNE AND MYSTERIOUS DISCOURSE Like its love of paradox, the Renaissance fascination with religious and philosophical “mysteries,” along with the hierophantic idea of the audience, has been well- documented.20 With Donne, this manifests itself most clearly in his approach to interpreting scripture, remarks about which can be found in his sermons and scattered throughout his prose works. It is worth comparing Donne with Herbert on this point. As we have seen in
The Country Parson, Herbert advocates for a performative approach to scripture, where the Word is as much a “script” as it is divine logos. We may contrast Herbert’s remarks with Donne’s comments on that same text.
In a famous and extraordinary passage from Donne’s Devotions, he discusses scriptural interpretation directly as well as the figural nature of Biblical discourse:
My God, my God, Thou art a direct God, may I not say, a literall God, a God that wouldest bee understood literally, and according to the plaine sense of all that thou saiest? But thou art also (Lord I intend it to thy glory, and let no prophane mis- interpreter abuse it to thy diminution) thou art a figurative, a metaphoricall God too: A God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extentions, such spreadings, such Curtaines of Allegories, such third Heavens of Hyperboles, so harmonious eloquutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding perswasions, so perswading commandments . . . . O, what words but thine, can expresse the inexpressible texture, and composition of thy word; in which, to one Man, that argument that binds his faith to beleeve that to bee the Word of God, is the reverent simplicity of the Word, and to another, the majesty of the Word; and in which two men, equally pious, may meet, and wonder, that all should not understand it, and the other, as much, that any man should.21
20 See, in particular, the following classic studies: Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968); Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 21 John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 99. 148 For Donne, the power of scripture is derived from its stylistic ambiguity. It makes “plaine sense” at the same time as it is complex, highly stylized, figural, and allegorical. It condescends to man through the use of figures, but these are also the devices God uses, as
Donne see it, to convey an “inexpressible texture” that persuades one to faith.
This mature statement goes well beyond remarks made in his youth, that “we defend and maintain this book of Moses to be Historical, and therefore literally to be interpreted,” lest we “are utterly disprovided of a history of the World’s creation.”22 The later Donne is closer to Augustine than to the Protestant literalists.23 One can and must take scripture literally, but figuration plays a key role in its persuasiveness; if we say it is only
“plaine sense,” we inadvertently deny God’s rhetorical ingenuity.
In short, God says what he means to say, but the process of trying to understand him is what strikes the reader with fear and wonder. Augustine argues that, for such understanding to happen, one must have the requisite knowledge of grammar and rhetoric:
Lettered men should know, moreover, that all those modes of expression which the grammarians designate with the Greek word tropes were used by our authors, and more abundantly and copiously than those who do not know them and have learned about such expressions elsewhere are able to suppose or believe. Those who know these tropes, however, will recognize them in the sacred letters, and this knowledge will be of considerable assistance in understanding them.
After a brief discussion of allegoria, aenigma, parabola, and irony, he concludes with the following statement:
22 Donne, Essayes in Divinity; by the Late Dr Donne, Dean of St Paul’s. Being Several Disquisitions, Interwoven with Meditations and Prayers: Before He Entred into Holy Orders (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1651), 16. 23 For a discussion of Protestant philological study, see James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 33–64. 149 And what unlearned man does not say such things without knowing at all what these tropes are or what they are called? Yet an awareness of them is necessary to a solution of the ambiguities of the Scriptures, for when the sense is absurd if it is taken verbally, it is to be inquired whether or not what is said is expressed in this or that trope which we do not know; and in this way many hidden things are discovered.24
As Thomas O. Sloane has pointed out, the sermon, while it became “a kind of Christianized oration,” “involved essentially Scriptural interpretation.” This required that the priest be cognizant of the different “levels of meaning (literal or historical, allegorical, anagogical or mystical, and moral) of this or that Scriptural passage dilated and diffused into a discourse.” For Donne, “the doctrine which becomes the form, or soul, of the sermon is the interpretation of Scripture.”25 Scripture, like poetry, requires a diligent critical eye to unpack, and Donne’s experiments with poetry left him well-prepared for the career that would ultimately make him famous. Poetry and poetic terminology, unsurprisingly, can be found quite often in Donne’s sermons.
Sloane argues that these remarks show that Donne perceived a fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry: rhetoric appeals to the understanding through formal organization (the logical arrangement, or dispositio of the sermon),26 whereas
24 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1958), 102–4. 25 Thomas O. Sloane, “The Poetry in Donne’s Sermons,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 29, no. 4 (2011): 410. 26 This echoes Sloane’s argument elsewhere about the Donne’s use of dispositio: “A central epistemological issue in this oration [the funeral sermon for William Cockayne]—and, I think, in Donne’s work generally—is the problem of trying to grasp a sensed, immutable truth with mutable, human instruments of perception and analysis . . . . But when we try to determine how all these passages relate to each other in something other than a merely conventional way, we find no clear, tightly organized discourse. That is to say, the memorability of the sermon does indeed lie in various, separable passages that accumulate, and perhaps overwhelm, strung together as they are in a form dictated not by ‘content’. . . but by convention, ritual, and will. Thus, Donne’s use of form is pervaded by his skepticism—that is, his diffidence—concerning the efficacy of form in capturing truth.” End of Humanist Rhetoric, 18. 150 poetry appeals to pleasure through its ability to move (movere). On the other hand, Lynette
McGrath contends that “it is clear” that Donne, like Sidney, “acknowledged poetry’s position in the ranks of serious persuasive rhetoric.”27 And what makes poetry persuasive, for Sidney, once again, is not so much its style as its fore-conceit, the idea or res behind the poetic verba. Though we find in Donne nothing so clear-cut as Sidney’s Neoplatonic fore-conceit, the following passage from one of his sermons is strikingly similar. Donne speaks here about the ascent of the imagination to God:
First then, from the meanest artificer, through the wisest Philosopher, to God himselfe, all that is well done, or wisely undertaken, is undertaken and done according to preceptions, fore-imaginations, designes and patterns proposed to our selves beforehand . . . . Of God himselfe, it is safely resolved in the Schoole, that he never did any thing in any part of time, of which he had not an eternall pre- conception, an eternall Idea, in himselfe before . . . . Of all things in Heaven, and earth, but of himselfe, God had an Idea, a patterne in himselfe, before he made it . . . . God does nothing, man does nothing well, without these Ideas, these retrospects, this re-course to pre-conceptions, pre-deliberations.28
The crucial difference between Sidney and Donne, McGrath argues, was that “Donne seems to have felt” that man “was more than likely to mar the connection between his own
Idea and God’s.” (Sidney does allude specifically to the “fallen” imagination that copies nature only imperfectly, however.) Most important, though, is that man does nothing well without “recourse” to the “pre-conceptions” and “pre-deliberations” of God. This expands
Augustine’s interpretation of allegory making language more evident (evidentia/enargeia) into Sidnean territory—the poet, the “maker,” is most divine when he imitates the “Maker
27 Lynette McGrath, “John Donne’s Apology for Poetry,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 20, no. 1 (1980): 77. 28 Donne, The Sermons of John Donne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 7.60-61. Quoted in McGrath, “Donne’s Apology for Poetry,” 80. 151 of that maker.” What persuades is not so much style, for Donne, but something like the
Sidnean Idea. The poet’s role is to fashion a “patterne” that, like Scripture, must be deciphered to be of any use. This does not mean that style is unimportant, though—far from it.
Another influence on Donne, as Biester has argued, was likely Demetrius’ On
Style,29 particularly Demetrius’ notion of the forceful style. Like Hermogenes’ On Types of Style, Demetrius was rediscovered in the Renaissance and, though his treatise was not as influential as that of Hermogenes, it had some impact (as Annabel M. Patterson notes,
Torquato Tasso, an Italian contemporary of Donne, explicitly refers to On Style in his prose writings).30 Biester has argued that On Style played a role in the development of what he calls the “admirable style,” one marked by a forcefulness that, in the absence of a coherent
Renaissance theory of lyric, was developed in order to “compete” with dramatists, and which gave lyric poets a way to conceptualize a version of Aristotelian “wonder.”31 On
Style, I argue, also has a direct bearing on Donne’s hermeneutic approach to rhetorical and poetic figuration, an approach partly inspired by Augustine, but which reflects more widespread Renaissance assumptions about how literature works on its audience to train judgment.
29 This text was falsely attributed to the famed Demetrius of Phalerum, which is likely why it survived. It was probably written by a second-century Peripatetic named Demetrius or a Demetrius closely affiliated with the Peripatetics. 30 Annabel M. Patterson, Hermogenes and the Renaissance: Seven Ideas of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 31–32. 31 See Biester’s introduction to Lyric Wonder, 1–22. 152 On Style outlines four main styles: in this regard, it is a conservative and somewhat derivative recapitulation of the plain/grand style dichotomy, which Demetrius further divides into two subtypes. We are left with a grand style, an elegant style, a plain style, and a forceful style. However, it is Demetrius’ discussion of the uses of the four styles in both poetry and oratory that makes On Style particularly relevant here.
Forcefulness, as the editor of the Loeb edition of On Style explains, “already interested the Peripatetics, particularly the distinction between a smooth unemotional epideictic style and a more vigorous forensic style of oral delivery.”32 But forcefulness also involves allegorical expressions for its rhetorical effects. Demetrius explains:
Allegory is also impressive, particularly in threats, for example that of Dionysius [Demetrius misattributes the following quotation from the poet Stesichorus], “their cicadas will sing from the ground.” If he had said openly that he would ravage the land of Locris, he would have shown more anger but less dignity. As it is, he has shrouded his words, as it were, in allegory. What is implied always strikes more terror, since its meaning is open to different interpretations, whereas what is clear and plain is apt to be despised, like men who are stripped of their clothes.
It should be noted that Demetrius’ description is much closer to the Rhetorica ad
Herennium’s “permutatio by comparison,” allegory conceived as a succinct group of related metaphors rather than as a single extended metaphor.33 This makes sense, as the forceful style is also brief, a feature that perhaps made it attractive to lyric poets. Demetrius continues: “[t]his is why the mysteries are revealed in allegories, to inspire the shuddering and awe associated with darkness and night. In fact, allegory is not unlike darkness and
32 See the introduction to Demetrius, On Style, ed. Doreen C. Innes, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 329. 33 See Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.34.46. 153 night. Here again in the case of allegory we should avoid a succession of them, or our words become a riddle.”34
Henry Peacham, writing in 1622, discusses the efficacy of allegory and other figures in a similar manner. He says the following about the Psalms:
What lively descriptions are there of the majesty of God, the estate and security of God’s children, the miserable condition of the wicked! What lively similitudes and comparisons, as the righteous man to a bay tree, the soul to a thirsty hart, unity to ointment and the dew of Hermon! What excellent allegories, as the vine planted in Egypt, what epiphonemas, prosopopoeias, whatsoever else may be required to the texture of so rich and glorious a piece!
The authorities Peacham cites are not only the “heathen poets,” but also Church Fathers like Augustine: “[b]esides the allowance they have given of poetry,” including foregrounding the scriptural use of the poetic figures he lists above, “they teach us the true use and end thereof, which is to compass the songs of Sion and address the fruit of our invention to His glory.” However, when considering the audience of biblical poetry,
Peacham considers it also a “mechanical art,” the effects of which are to be judged according to how well poetry transforms “brutishness into civility.”35 The Bible is not simply a text that saves; it is a text that civilizes.
A civilized style, then, when recognized, will lead to the civilizing of the audience, principally because poetic art has a direct “mechanical” effect on the will and judgment of that audience. Allegory and other tropes “deceive” in order to instruct, and they accomplish this by inciting the reader do the interpretive work necessary to perceive the idea of virtue
34 Demetrius, On Style 99–102. 35 Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living in London, ed. Virgil B. Hertzel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 92. 154 figured forth by the poet. Poetic figuration’s “sovereign power over the mind” 36 is not an end in itself; rather, by directly affecting the will, the passions, and the faculty of judgment, it is able to reveal what lies hidden in poetic obscurity, lending an idea dignity by the very process of having the reader uncover it.
As we have seen in chapter two, William Scott compares stylistic force with
Aristotelian peripeteia—he in fact sees style as peripeteia, a turn away from literal sense in a sort of dramatic, stylistic “reversal.” Also noteworthy is Scott’s idea that stylistic force rests on mystery. Somewhat paradoxically, in order to possess “the mind of the hearer or reader with efficacy and pleasure which makes him easily and cheerfully apprehend the thing delivered,” the poet must obscure his words:
Thus the poet must strive to make evident and clear his apt conceits, his main scope, and likewise season all with a sensible pleasantness. And this latter, first to be handled in this place, is chiefly in the smooth and cleanly alterations which by reason of cozening the expectation (as Quintilian saith) are always delightful, either with gladness if they be to the more glad and more welcome part, or with astonishing the admiration if they be turned to more sad and unworthy events (which falls under the consideration of the next last virtues). Such are those peripeteiae, as you would say indirect compassings of matters, when the strange, unexpected issue of things falls out otherwise than the direct tenor or purport of that went before and there is something properly and handsomely brought about contrary to the bent of the matter or expectation of the reader or beholder, as when friends by some unlooked-for accident fall from one another or enemies are reconciled, which is ordinarily by revealing of something unknown or covered or disguised.37
“Cozening,” or deceiving, is precisely what gives the audience enough “sensible pleasantness” to provoke them to pierce through poetry’s darkness. Unveiling something
36 Peacham, 92. 37 Scott, Model of Poesy, 38–39. 155 “unknown or covered or disguised” thus leads to the sense of surprise that makes this process pleasurable. Scott’s comments are close in this respect to Aristotle’s claim that poetry and other mimetic arts arise from the pleasure we get from learning, and that learning happens through imitation. Learning is indeed the greatest pleasure, as we see in the Poetics:
[T]o be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning—gathering the meaning of things, e.g., that the man there is so-and-so; for if one has not seen the thing before, one’s pleasure will not be in the picture as an imitation of it, but will be due to the execution or colouring or some similar cause.38
The pleasure one gets from learning does not exist in the artwork itself, but is rather evoked as a result of the formal arrangement of the artistic medium. Learning, furthermore, means recognizing that a certain arrangement in that artistic medium signifies something else, for example, that “the man there is so-and-so.” Again, this is much closer to Platonic recollection—and is thus dialectical and interpretative—than it is to persuasion in the traditional sense.
An allegorically hidden fore-conceit, in this respect, also calls to mind how, in the hermeneutic tradition, scriptum relates to voluntas. The “arts of rhetoric,” Eden notes,
“characterize meaning differently in their different sections: under invention as intentionality—what moral and legal agents mean to do or say—and under elocution as signification—what words mean.” Furthermore, “[i]n those parts of the manuals covering interpretatio scripti, these two concepts of meaning collide, engendering not only the
38 Aristotle, Poetics 1448b10-20. 156 overlap between the first and second grounds of controversy”—the “letter,” or scriptum, and the “spirit,” or voluntas, of the law or text in question—“but also the competing claims of voluntas and scriptum.”39
Scriptum often obscures voluntas in both legal and poetic discourse. For example,
Aristotle’s Poetics rests on what were originally legal assumptions about what makes language forceful and effective:
In tragedy, as in legal oratory, the object represented is human action, usually a past action and often a hamartia, an error in judgment. The tragic poet and the forensic orator, equally bound by the demands of probability, both face the task of transforming past action—the outline of a plot or the facts of a case—from a random and inexplicable series of isolated events into a logical sequence of cause and effect. Insofar as the spectators at a theatrical performance or the jury at a legal trial witness, as if with their own eyes, an action that has been skillfully represented according to these requirements, they will—in Aristotle’s view—learn from that representation not only what happened but why. And they will be moved in both cases to fear and pity and to reach the kinds of judgments that accompany those responses.40
In tragedy, of course, actions can speak for themselves. In forensic oratory, though, to
“represent a scene enargically” means conceptualizing it in language so that the scriptum shows the voluntas of either the defendant or the law in question. When it concerns the written text, this goal “pertains equally to poet and orator.”41
But in the Renaissance the emphasis shifts from the skillful language the poet or orator uses to the idea itself, “to the artistic image, rather than . . . the speaker’s efforts to represent his own impressions skillfully.”42 Poetry might involve a forceful style, but it is
39 Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 10–11. See also her companion article, “Hermeneutics and the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition.” 40 Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction, 5. 41 Eden, 72. 42 Eden, 153. 157 “no cause to poetry,” as Sidney would say. The true “cause” of poetry is not its form but the ideas or intentions it conceals. And interpreting the hidden meanings of an “image” of virtue allows the reader to “discern the causes of excellence,” “how and why the maker made him.”43 This ability to discern ideas through literary judgment thus has a direct bearing on ethical and even theological judgment. The cognitive moves are similar: the interpreter’s task is to find out why the maker—divine or human—arranges things so that they have a certain “character,” both in the sense of the marks on the page (scriptum) and the intention of the author (voluntas).
Where Demetrius cautioned against overly obscure language (lest the discourse becomes a “riddle”), the Renaissance valued poetic language primarily for its ability to
“cozen,” being equal parts a source of pleasure and an educative tool. This leads to the paradoxical status of poetic ornament in the Renaissance: highly ornamental language is valued and enjoyed, but not for its own sake; what is prized is its ability to communicate what Donne calls the “inexpressible texture” of ideas as well the pleasure one gets from learning what these ideas are. Joan Webber observes that “[f]or Donne the sermon exists inside the letter of the text, while for the Puritan the sermon exists inside the spirit; in
Donne’s view, reverence for the letter insures the spirit’s power.”44 This claim is applicable to his poetry, as well, and, as Sidney and Scott make clear, to poetry in general, as long as we understand poetry as Donne did, as an analytical and not “merely” figural art.
43 Eden, 165. 44 Joan Webber, Contrary Music: The Prose Style of John Donne (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 146. 158 ANALYTICAL RHETORIC IN THE HOLY SONNETS In his landmark study of Donne’s poetry, Sloane argues that, in Donne’s later religious verse, his sermons, and in his less “controversial” work, “[r]hetoric became no longer a means of ‘inventing’ truth but a means of reasoning about it and arguing for it.”
Controversia, or rather “the imitation or semblance of controversial thinking” was still present in Donne, even when he spoke about subject matter “profoundly antagonistic to it.”45 Yet a humanist poetics does not seek to argue about what truth is so much as how to recognize it; nor is Donne’s religious poetry, likely written when he was still debating whether to take orders, concerned with subject matter “antagonistic” to these
“controversial” interpretive principles. In fact, it is the most appropriate discourse in which to debate such matters.
Again, as with Herbert, I think it important that we consider the “sociological” nature of Donne’s religious verse. What role did it serve for Donne and his audience, and what motives does it reflect? While Donne’s verse is perhaps not an act of “unburdening” in quite the same way as Herbert’s, I think both offer some measure of consolation. Like
Herbert, that Donne writes religious poetry in such a highly analytical way reveals sincerity in addition to rhetorical adeptness. Donne’s audience would certainly appreciate how his analytic style reflects the complexity—the ambiguity—of Christian life and doctrine, but more importantly they would also appreciate how his verse invites the kind of pleasure in learning that occurs when one interprets, and resolves, poetic difficulty.
45 Sloane, End of Humanist Rhetoric, 189. 159 Holy Sonnet 16 exemplifies both the forceful style and Donne’s interpretive approach toward doctrinal matters:
Father, part of his double interest Unto thy kingdome, thy Sonne gives to mee, His joynture in the knottie Trinitie, He keeps, and gives to me his deaths conquest. This lambe, whose death, with life the world hath blest, Was from the worlds beginning slaine, and he Hath made two Wills, which with the Legacie Of his and thy kingdome, doe thy Sonnes invest, Yet such are these laws, that men argue yet Whether a man those statutes can fulfill; None doth, but thy all-healing grace and spirit Revive againe what law and letter kill. Thy lawes abridgement, and thy last command Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand!46
The “knottie Trinitie,” wonderous because it is intricately “woven” by God, is also supremely difficult to understand (another sense of “knottie”). And Donne uses this problematic metaphor to set up the hermeneutic principle that later resolves it: “thy all- healing grace and spirit / Revive againe what law and letter kill.” This references 2
Corinthians 3.6: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” The Gospel replaces the Law. Yet Christian understanding is still legalistic in the sense that the Gospel requires correct discernment of the voluntas behind the scriptum. The scriptum—the “letter” that
“kills”—is both a figural flourish, a metaphor for the “Will” of Christ, and an important argument about the unimportance of the legalistic interpretation of what “Will” means,
46 All references to Donne’s poetry are from The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985). 160 accomplished paradoxically by the manner of reasoning that the poem uses to understand grace. Scriptum is important, but only insofar as it demonstrates, through whatever means necessary, the superiority of voluntas. Donne’s formulation here is striking and witty, but it presents a fairly straightforward Christian doctrine as well as a common hermeneutic assumption about the importance of the spirit of the law.
Donne is also making a statement about poetic art, about the difficulty of understanding and about the hermeneutic procedure that might help one achieve understanding. It is also encouraging—it is a demonstration that a hermeneutic approach works. Donne more closely resembles Herbert here in his certainty than he does elsewhere.
Though Herbert vacillates between optimistic and pessimistic accounts of his relation with
God, and even verges on blasphemy at times, one never gets the sense from him that he doubts his salvation. Donne, on the other hand, is often much more cynical.
Holy Sonnet 14, “Batter my heart,” is more impressive and riskier; one of Donne’s most widely read poems, it famously compares the doctrine of irresistible grace to rape:
Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you As but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new. I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due, Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end, Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue, Yet dearly’I love you,’and would be love’d faine, But am betroth’d unto your enemie, Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe, Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I, Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
161 Far from taking comfort in in the Gospel of love, Donne in fact makes the case that a God of love is ineffective: “you / As but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend,” but this does no good. This poem is again a kind of triangulated address, addressed to both God and the reader, and, given what we know of Donne’s hardships before he took orders, I think a sincere petition for salvation. It is so desperate, in fact, that it seeks consolation by means of an argument against comfort: “break that knot,” in addition to meaning “divorce me,” might also, like the “knottie Trinitie” of the previous poem, refer to his predicament being profoundly difficult to understand and bear, such that the violence of “rape” would be preferable.
As William Kerrigan puts it, a fearful Donne seems to seek solace in the “balm of paradox.”47 Kerrigan has already produced a quite remarkable reading of “Batter my heart,” investigating the psychoanalytic and the religiously unorthodox ramifications of divine rape, and how Donne “with insistent wit . . . made the old metaphors reveal their hidden grotesquerie.”48 I only wish to add to his observations that divine rape might, in the end, be the most appropriate metaphor for the supremely difficult position in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christians found themselves: grace is indeed irresistible, but this reflects a situation that is predetermined and therefore imposed upon them. Donne’s metaphor, then, in a way, is an exploration of the logic of divine imposition, bringing that idea to a logical, if extreme, conclusion.
47 William Kerrigan, “The Fearful Accommodations of John Donne,” English Literary Renaissance 4, no. 3 (1974): 358. 48 Kerrigan, 363. 162 Baumlin contends that “readers may associate Jack Donne with a rhetoric of skepticism, Dr. Donne with a rhetoric of dogmatic assertion.” I find this hard to accept, at least regarding “Batter my heart.” Baumlin wants to link the wit, involuted paradoxes, and metaphorical scope of the Holy Sonnets with Donne’s more “orthodox” sermons. In this way, Baumlin asserts, Donne’s “religious poetry tends to be conservative in form, seeking to validate its arguments by enacting its lyric genres.”49 In a sense, this is correct; Donne never argues anything so far beyond what is doctrinally “correct” that it cannot, in some measure, be justified or accounted for. Nor are his poetic methods so idiosyncratic as to be outside common traditions. This does not mean, though, that he did not push any formal or dogmatic boundaries. About this point, Kerrigan says the following:
Human terms were the only ones he had. Donne could not conceive of God without discovering, somewhere in the folds of his conception, human vice. It may be objected that the two poems I have discussed [“Batter my heart” and “Show me deare Christ”] do not unravel metaphors inherent in Christian theology; one may dismiss the religious implications of these fearful accommodations by supposing that Donne, acting out some private compulsion, deliberately generated the inessential images of God the rapist and Christ the willing cuckold. But consequences of anthropomorphism as grotesque as these lie coiled in the most central Christian doctrines.50
“Batter my heart” traffics in fear as much as consolation; Donne seems concerned less with how to “turn delight into a sacrifice” than with how to foreground theological problems.
The most natural method of going about this is to use rhetoric as a tool to search for a means to understand and portray accurately divine ways. This is Donne not unburdening
49 Baumlin, John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 34. 50 Kerrigan, “Fearful Accommodations,” 360. 163 so much as burdening himself (and the reader), seeking to express the “inexpressible texture” in a way his readers might, with some difficulty, understand. To this end, Donne’s poetry is concerned with the “right use of manner and matter,” as Sidney puts it.51 Truly seeking to encapsulate the controversies and complexities of Protestant dogma, though, for
Donne, means risking anxiety, impropriety, and even blasphemy. Divine rape is shocking, but it is comprehensible—and unforgettable. As Kerrigan rightly states, “it is true that God is fearful because he is incomprehensible. It is equally true that God is fearful because we can and do understand him.”52
The question then is, why circulate such poems? The answer, in part, is simple and obvious, but it has important implications: they had to be interpreted—otherwise they would not only be of little use, but their merits as poetry would go unrealized. Donne, as I mentioned above, approached his poems in such a way that they seem self-contained, insofar as he seeks to examine a topic that is already a given rather than to persuade the reader of its validity. Donne’s audience, like any roughly homogenous audience, likely shared many of his assumptions, and aristocratic readers with a similar poetic taste might simply have appreciated the task of solving a puzzle. Biester points out that an “enigmatic poem as a whole supplies the challenge of a puzzle and the satisfaction of a puzzle solved.”53 But they would also likely appreciate the importance of getting at the intentions
51 Sidney, “Defence of Poetry,” 121. 52 Kerrigan, “Fearful Accommodations,” 362. 53 Biester, Lyric Wonder, 15. 164 and ethical constitution (the voluntas) of Donne that, when revealed, demonstrates a similar ethical constitution in themselves.
Alvarez argues that the difficulty of Donne’s love poetry arose partly from its being arcane discourse meant for poetic “insiders.” This is indeed the case with his religious poetry, too: Donne sent a number of his religious poems (probably the La Corona sequence) to at least one patron, Magdalen Herbert, the head of a prominent literary circle with which Donne was affiliated.54 An aristocratic literary audience would have been familiar with the novel philosophical and scientific subjects to which Donne often refers, as Empson has shown,55 and would likely have been up to the task he put to them.
In a larger sense, however, Donne participates in a tradition that predates the
Renaissance. We can go back to Boccaccio, who in his Genealogia deorum gentilium defends the obscure nature of poetry with the following remarks:
If by chance in condemning the difficulty of the text, they really mean its figures of diction and oratorical colors and the beauty which they fail to recognize in alien words, if on this account they pronounce poetry obscure—my only advice is to go back to grammar schools, bow to the ferule, study and learn what license ancient authority granted the poets in such matters, and give particular attention to such alien terms as are permissible beyond common and homely use . . . . But I repeat my advice to those who would appreciate poetry, and unwind its difficult involutions. You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find clear which at first looked dark. For we are
54 Donne likely sent Magdalen Herbert only the La Corona sequence, but it is possible he circulated other sonnets in the Sidney-Herbert coterie. See Bald, John Donne, 182. 55 Empson, “Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition,” in Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 1, Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 63–77; “Donne the Space Man,” in Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 1, Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 78–128. 165 forbidden by divine command to give that which is holy to dogs, or to cast pearls before swine.56
Though speaking about Latin and Greek poetry, Boccaccio’s attitude is equally applicable to vernacular verse; Donne’s poetry indeed takes advantage of poetic “terms” that are
“permissible beyond common and homely use.” And poetic obscurity and difficulty are not only signs that such poetry contains a voluntas—an important but hidden idea obscured by its scriptum—that requires careful interpretation. Obscurity is also a marker of a nascent aesthetic, a kind of invitation to exercise and affirm one’s literary taste and faculty of judgment. As Sloane puts it, “[a]n audience hears and judges, or reads in order to hear and judge.”57
Why a sense of literary propriety is important is outlined even earlier still by
Quintilian. He explains that, “whether in real or fictitious discourse,” a legal or stylistic question automatically refers one to matters of popular “taste”:
As to words, it is questioned whether they be sufficiently expressive; or whether there is any ambiguity in them; as to matter, whether the law is consistent with itself . . . . But the most common inquiry is whether it be proper or expedient. Nor am I ignorant that of this inquiry divisions are made by most professors; but I, under the term “proper,” include consistency with justice, piety, religion, and other similar virtues.58
As Eden has shown, these same principles later become intertwined with textual criticism and literary judgment. We can see this happening already in the Middle Ages in Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s grammatical text, the Poetria nova:
56 Giovanni Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium in an English Version with Introductory Essay and Commentary, trans. Charles G. Osgood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930), 61–62. 57 Sloane, End of Humanist Rhetoric, xiii. 58 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 4.2.37-38. 166 First examine the mind of a word, and only then its face; do not trust the adornment of its face alone. If internal ornament is not in harmony with external, a sense of propriety is lacking. Adorning the face of a word is painting a worthless picture: it is a false thing, its beauty fictitious; the word is a whitewashed wall and a hypocrite, pretending to be something whereas it is nothing. Its fair form conceals deformity . . . . Take care, then, not to be hasty, but be Argus-eyed, examine the words in relation to the meaning proposed. If the meaning has dignity, let that dignity be preserved; see that no vulgar word may debase it.59
Geoffrey speaks here about the act of poetic composition, but we have seen that similar concerns about propriety shift in emphasis in the Renaissance to the idea itself, as Eden and Sloane have shown. Poetics, then, must emphasize the fact that rhetoric and poetry are alike, in that they are “faithful unfolders both of him that imitates and of the thing portrayed in the imitation.”60 Unlike the malleable mentis character of Puttenham, poetry and rhetoric can reveal an essential character unobscured, but only if the reader takes the time and effort to uncover it—poetry, in short, is able to reveal the ethical constitution of the author, the poem, and (implicitly) the reader, all in one interpretive motion.
It is the virtuous character of these three things—author, poem, and reader—that rhetorical style was understood to display, while at the same time reflecting the relationship of macrocosmic Ideas to microcosmic mental representations. Why this is important is that
Donne would have expected his audience to assume that our innate sense of propriety has its origins in being able to perceive, even if somewhat marred, the inexpressible texture of the divine. The ability to compose and recognize what is well-composed, furthermore, becomes something like a divine trait; as incitements to exercise judgment, Donne’s
59 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims, rev. ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010), 41. 60 Scott, Model of Poesy, 6. 167 religious poetry functions as both confirmation of the worth of the poet’s art and of the poet, and, when they are able to recognize that it is well-composed, of the reader as well.
This serves a roughly civic, if antidemocratic, role: confirmation that a given member of the governing class has the requisite faculties and innate worth to govern.
The Renaissance, as Biester observes, was a “culture that . . . claims to measure one’s ability to govern by the mark of eloquence.”61 It is also important to note that this happens squarely within the bounds of and according to the logic of humanist rhetoric, understood as a paideutic, readerly art. “Renaissance rhetoric,” Victoria Kahn argues, insofar as it is indebted to the humanist rhetorical tradition, “is by definition concerned with the effect of the text upon the reader, and in particular with educating or influencing the reader’s judgment.”62 It is this sense of propriety in his upper-class and aristocratic readers that Donne both exercises and tests. It is therefore the situation of coterie exchange, considered as aristocratic “insider discourse,” that will tell us the most about how Donne fits into this humanist, paideutic tradition.
PSALMIC INTERPRETATION, COTERIE EXCHANGE, AND LITERARY JUDGMENT Unlike Herbert, that Donne participated in coterie exchange and tailored the bulk of his poems to appeal to coterie audiences is without question, as is shown by Arthur F.
Marotti in his pioneering work.63 Marotti explains that, while Donne’s verse is indeed “self-
61 Biester, Lyric Wonder, 11. 62 Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 19. 63 The standard work is John Donne, Coterie Poet. See also Marotti’s Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric; “Manuscript, Print, and the Social History of the Lyric,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 168 reflexive,” he manifests in his verse “an acute consciousness of language and style as well as of the socioliterary circumstances of individual works.”64 Marotti’s achievement has been to dissolve the binary of the private and public nature of Donne’s verse; his verse was at the same time both private expression and public, “metacommunicative” rhetorical gesture. Donne’s poetry was influenced by the practices of “courtly and satellite-courtly verse,” and, with this in mind, the difficulty of his poetry can in part be explained by the fact that “the author and reader had a social relationship apart from the text that could be evoked as a context of composition and of reception/interpretation.”65
Devotional verse after the middle of the sixteenth century was a common form in which to compose courtly and court-adjacent verse, as May has demonstrated.66 Of crucial importance to the development of English devotional verse was the Sidney Psalter, a translation of the psalms begun by Philip Sidney and completed by his sister, Mary, the famed Countess of Pembroke. These psalms were circulated widely in manuscript at the
Elizabethan court, and Mary Sidney’s energetic style and wit were widely celebrated—so much so that at least one scholar locates in her translations the “germ of the metaphysical style.”67 After her death in 1621, Donne wrote a dedicatory poem for the “Sydnean
1993), 52–79; “Patronage, Poetry, and Print”; Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds., Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2001). 64 Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, 21. 65 Marotti, 20–21. 66 May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 200–223. 67 Gary F. Waller, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of Her Writings and Literary Milieu (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1979), 200. Quoted in May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets, 210. 169 Psalmes,” included in the 1635 edition of his poems. Like his sermons, this work contains several telling observations about devotional poetics.
The Sidnean Psalms, according to Donne, as works of translation, interpretation, and invention, serve a civic, religious function: they “have both translated, and apply’d [the literary exquisiteness of the psalms] too, / Both told us what, and taught us how to doe. /
Thy shew us Illanders our joy, our King, / They tell us why, and teach us how to sing” (19-
22). Indeed, Donne can “scarce call” the English Church “reform’d untill / This be reform’d” (40-41)—that is, until the public metrical psalms match the quality of these private (really semi-public) psalms. Donne concludes:
We thy Sydnean Psalmes shall celebrate, And, till we come th’Extemporall song to sing, (Learn’d the first hower, that we see the King, Who hath translated those translators) may These their sweet learned labours, all the way Be as our tuning, that, when hence we part We may fall in with them, and sing our part. (50-56)
Like the texture of the divine word that scripture captures darkly, these psalms represent the closest one can get in the temporal world to the “Extemporall song.” Translation, in a flourish of wit, is also rendered a semi-divine act that echoes God’s own metaphysical
“translation” of the Sidneys (both of whom were deceased by this point). The best we can do is carry on “singing” their work. It is possible that these psalms were performed in public or semi-public situations, but there is little evidence this was the case; their legacy was literary rather than liturgical. In fact, the whole metrical psalm movement, as Zim asserts, amounted to a literary movement all its own, influencing and comingling with
170 original devotional verse, and influencing later devotional writing such as Donne’s and
Herbert’s.68
What is of particular importance to Donne and later coterie verse, however, is the influence the metrical psalms had on ideas about what the proper form was that devotional poetry should take. The metrical psalms, in this respect, addressed a key humanist aim: providing a text with which to demonstrate the efficacy of the English language and its ability to match up to ancient precedent. As Richard Foster Jones argues in his classic study, the “key to an understanding of the dominant attitude toward the vernacular during the first three quarters of the sixteenth century is found in the unhappy comparison with
Latin and Greek,” and that this was manifested also “in the strong desire to educate the unlearned by translations and by original works in English.”69 Hebrew was similarly prized, and the Hebrew Bible provided a rich source text for stylistic invention and allegorical interpretation during the Reformation and post-Reformation age.70
Translating the metrical psalms was seen as evidence of an ability to interpret and imitate, both of which were markers of excellent literary and ethical judgment—metrical psalms and devotional poetry likewise became a sort of literary hub where translation, original composition, and interpretation of religious texts converged. The psalms were taught in the humanist classroom,71 and courtly audiences valued translations and original
68 Zim, English Metrical Psalms, 2. See also Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 114–24. 69 Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 168. 70 Magne Sæbø, ed., Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 2.370-77. 71 Zim, English Metrical Psalms, 32. 171 compositions both for their piety—Elizabeth encouraged public and semipublic displays of the Protestant faith72—and for their metrical innovations, rhetoric, and wit.73
The metrical psalms were valued for their allegorical content, as well. In this respect, the Sidney Psalter had one distinct advantage over the earlier Sternhold-Hopkins psalter: it was never meant for widespread public devotional use. As J. C. A. Rathmell argues, “whereas in congregational psalmody the necessity to provide a simple and easily memorable text virtually precludes any attempt at subtlety, the Sidnean versions, which were intended primarily for use in private devotions constantly bring out and point to the underlying ‘allegorical sense.’”74 George Wither, a poet who would go on to translate the psalms himself, defends this practice as follows:
First, whereas they say that Verse cannot retaine that grauity, which becommeth the authority of holy scriptures, it is false: for how can that speech be denied to haue in it grauity, wherein euery word and syllable must be considered in quantity or number? or who can bee so ignorant, to think so, but such as are altogether strangers unto the Muses? For euery language, Verse hath more elegances then Prose can haue.
He then references the psalms’ status as allegorical discourse: “And I am of opinion . . . that it was partly by reason of extraordinary maiesty and pleasingnes which is in Numbers,
72 May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets, 201. 73 The more innovative translations were Mary’s. Not everyone agrees that the Sidney Psalms are good poetry, however. May is particularly unenthused: “Ironically, in both their rhetoric and the tendency of short-line stanzas toward a sing-song rhythm, the effect of Sidney’s Psalms often harkens back to the ‘drab’ verse which his advances in technique had largely rendered passé. In the final analysis, these forty-three psalms, however ingeniously contrived, are only competent in execution.” May finds Mary Sidney’s poems slightly better, but similarly hampered by her attempts to mimic quantitative verse. May, 205. 74 J. C. A. Rathmell, ed., The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke (New York: New York University Press, 1963), xiv. 172 that the holy Ghost chose in them (rather then otherwise) to set downe these Mysteries, as the most fitting language to expresse sacred things.”75
While the metrical psalm movement plateaued in the seventeenth century, the devotional poetry it inspired continued unabated. Donne was obviously impressed with, and likely influenced by, the Sidney Psalter. According to Rathmell, Donne’s “praise was not, as some critics have implied, an act of piety, but the deliberated judgment of a man who by the nature of his dual vocation”—Donne was by this time a priest, although he had largely given up writing poetry—“was singularly well qualified to have an opinion in such matters.”76 In the dissemination of Donne’s own devotional verse, literary judgment—both
Donne’s and his audience’s—is invited, defended, and put on display in a manner similar to how he and others approached the metrical psalms.
Questions about the propriety of Donne’s verse, about Donne’s own moral and theological judgment, seem to be intentionally raised by the shocking nature of his analogies. This can be seen in “Batter my heart” and in Holy Sonnet 18, “Show me deare
Christ,” which ends with a comparison that, like “Batter my heart,” goes quite a bit beyond the traditional marriage/adultery and erotic metaphors of scripture:
Show me deare Christ, thy Spouse, so bright and clear. What! is it she, which on the other shore Goes richly painted? or which rob’d and tore Laments and mournes in Germany and here? Sleepes she a thousand, then peepes up one yeare? Is she selfe truth and errs? now new, now outwore? Doth she, and did she, and shall she evermore On one, on seaven, or on no hill appeare?
75 George Wither, A Preparation to the Psalter (London: Nicholas Okes, 1619), 7. 76 Rathmell, Psalms, xxxi. 173 Dwells she with us, or like adventuring knights First travaile we seek and then make Love? Betray kind husband thy spouse to our sights, And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove, Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then When she’is embrac’d and open to most men.
This poem, unsurprisingly, appears in only one manuscript. It was likely far too shocking for dissemination beyond a relatively restricted, likely male, coterie audience. While
Marotti argues that Donne was often intentionally indecorous in his religious poetry in order to provoke a response from his readers, he thinks that Donne’s attempt probably ventured too far to be effective—the Church is, after all, portrayed as an adulteress and
Christ an acquiescent cuckold.77
I think Marotti is a bit too dismissive here. While the poem would indeed go too far for most, for a restricted audience of insiders who knew Donne (this is most likely a later poem, perhaps even written after he took orders), it might be something approaching a bawdy, though topical, allegory. The list of questions about the inconstancy of the “bride” build up to a kind of riddle by the point of the volta, where the poem switches from question to petition, referencing the moderate position encouraged by the Elizabethan Settlement and later Jacobean ecclesiastical policy. While Marotti and others (such as Gardner) see the poem as somewhat playful, if flawed and distastefully witty, we can again look back to classical precedent: its style seems closest to that of forceful invective.
77 Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, 282–83. 174 Demetrius, when citing the “rigorous” nature of forceful style, notes that
“[s]moothness of composition . . . is not well suited to forceful speech.” He goes on to explain the use of hiatus to create striking sentences in the following manner:
The fact is that words which are unpremeditated, and somehow spontaneous, will in themselves create some vigour, especially when we show our anger or sense of injustice, whereas careful attention to smoothness and harmony signals not anger so much as a lack of seriousness or a display of rhetoric. As has already been said, the figure of abruptness creates force. The same may be said of abrupt composition on a wider scale. Hipponax is a case in point. Wanting to insult his enemies, he shattered his metre, he made it limp instead of walk straight, he made the rhythm irregular, and therefore suitable for forceful insult.78
The “limping” style of Hipponax’s invective is especially useful for describing the poetry of Donne, who often achieves something similar through a plethora of periods and commas.
Even Aristotle, who is famously hostile to unclear speech, recognizes its usefulness in
“legal accusation and defense,” as Eden points out.79
The other classical precedent is the use of hyponoia, or allegorical ambiguity that conceals one’s dianoia (voluntas), or intention. Demetrius, as we have seen, notes the forceful style’s use in obscuring allegorical meaning—one must read a poem “rigorously” to uncover it. Eden notes that Aristotle uses the term hyponoia positively “in reference to the schema [figures] characteristic of New Comedy,” which Aristotle found more refined than older comedy, and contrasts this figure with “the crude obscenities which characterize
Old Comedy.”80 Eden points to the following passage in Aristotle:
the civilized person’s amusement differs from the slavish person’s, and the educated person’s from the uneducated person’s. This can also be seen from old
78 Demetrius, On Style 299-301. 79 Eden, “Hermeneutics and the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition,” 74. 80 Eden, 74. 175 and new comedies; for what people used to find funny was shameful abuse, but what they now find funny instead is hyponoia, which constitutes no small stylistic or schematic refinement.81
If something verges on the obscene in newer comedy, it is no longer so obvious how it is obscene. The educated will get it and find it amusing; this and other ambiguous or allegorical discourse appeals to those with refined taste, and can be defended as such, as long as they have to perform intellectual labor to get the point.
I think Donne is calling out his aristocratic—even if restricted—audience in a similar manner. This, along with the social, metacommunicative aspects of Donne’s coterie verse, might very well temper the shock. Perhaps Donne was indeed joking and his audience was in on the joke—the forceful style is, after all, often a scheme to convey hyponoia that hide dianoia, or actual intentions, which were likely much more evident to his immediate audience. Regarding Donne’s coterie readers, Alvarez makes the following important point:
The pleasure they got from his and from each other’s poetry was the same kind of enjoyment that one of the circle, Sir Richard Baker, found in Tacitus: “[His] very obscurity is pleasing to whosoever by laboring about it, finds out the true meaning; for then he counts it an issue of his own braine, and taking occasion from these sentences to goe further than the thing he reads, and that without being deceived, he takes the like pleasure as men are wont to take from hearing metaphors, finding the meaning of him that useth them.” It was the coterie pleasure of recognizing one another’s wit, almost as though the readers were let in on a secret. The style presumed on the fact that both poets and audience had had the same kind of training, done much the same reading and shared the same taste for the skeptical, paradoxical and, above all, the dialectical.82
81 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 1128a20-25. I am using Eden’s modified translation, in “Hermeneutics and the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition,” 75. Aristotle is likely talking about “older” and “newer” comedy, not the canonical Old and New Comedy, however. 82 Alvarez, School of Donne, 36–37. 176 The readership of Donne’s religious verse—comprised of friends like Henry
Goodyer and George Garrad, as well as Magdalen Herbert (recipient of the La corona sequence), the Earl of Dorset, and perhaps even a young George Herbert—provided Donne the opportunity to explore both personal and communal religious themes and assert his own poetic authority. “In contrast to most of his earlier verse, in which the reader was often overtly treated as an antagonist” Marotti argues, “the divine poems emphasize the collective ‘we’ and the representativeness of the speaker to affirm an emotional-intellectual bond between speaker and listener, poet and reader.” However, Marotti finds these sincere assertions and gestures of communality undermined by Donne’s “aggressive” aim to shock:
There are, however, also opposite gestures of aggression toward the listener and the reader by means of which the poet, as in the complimentary verse [i.e., Donne’s poems of praise], asserted his intellectual and literary authority in the very midst of his expressions of personal vulnerability and need. The strong language, the violent and shocking metaphors, the poems’ sudden changes of thought and turns of development characteristically proclaim Donne’s individuality and aesthetic superiority in ways that seem to undercut the stance of humble piety and communal spokesmanship.83
Furthermore, for Marotti, these communal gestures only become “literary”—as we understand the term—when they are “decontextualized” and printed in miscellanies with other authors’ poems.84 While Marotti observes ways in which coteries established poetic
“codes” and developed genres like answer poems that “converse” with prior poems, I would argue that literary judgment remained the defining characteristic of these circles.
Also, “literary judgment”—logon krisis—as we see in the Protagoras and in On the
83 Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, 260. 84 Marotti, 15. Marotti refers here to Helgerson’s study of the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan literary systems. See Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 177 Sublime, is a kind of communal “spokesmanship” insofar as it enacts and invites good judgment through a kind of dialectical-literary exchange, exemplifying the standards of literary propriety in both an ethical and an aesthetic sense. In the Renaissance, what characterizes a text as “literary” is not so much the materiality of the printed text, but how well the intentions of the writer are perceived to be carried out.
Most importantly, though, those who intuit these intentions would be assured that they indeed have the intellectual capacity confirming their status as members of a given coterie—and as members of elite society in general. Presumably, if they can interpret involuted and forcefully obscure allegorical speech, they can more than likely compose it, or at least make a good attempt at it (or prove good critics of it). This is a practice that retains a particular humanist inflection: if you are literate and eloquent—if you are able to participate in the literary critical “rituals” that are first encountered in the classroom and from which the interpretive practices of the literate class derive—you are able affirm or reaffirm your class status and moral worth as one of Elyot’s governors. Just as we who interpret Donne get satisfaction as well as assurance that we indeed belong to a “class” of academics, Donne’s audience would likely receive a similar kind of satisfaction by being able to understand something close to what Donne was getting at. I think Donne counted on as much in order to push even the comparatively moderate doctrinal limitations imposed on so rapacious an intellect as his.
178 CONCLUSION As with Puttenham and Herbert, we can locate Donne’s assumptions about rhetoric partly in the social conditions of the Renaissance literate class—those who composed poetry, translated psalms, interpreted difficult literature, and who sought in part through the use and development of these skills to actively participate in English civil society.
However, we also see conditions that recapture, as the Renaissance sought to do, what the classical world accomplished with its rhetoric and poetics. It is quite obvious that the
Renaissance inherited ideas about the dignity of difficult poetry and about interpretive ambiguity as a marker of literary distinction from the ancient world—humanist philological and educational practices saw to this. What I have called paideutic poetics, which sees poetry’s goals as theoretical rather than technical, ensured that the assumptions about the disparate nature of rhetoric and poetics, arising from centuries of these arts being thought of and argued about as something other than the singular body of discourse they once were, stayed firmly in place. In the paideutic tradition, poetics is not so much an art of stylistic invention as it is a method of investigation: it is epistemic rather than technical, and it aims to uncover hidden truths rather than to persuade audiences. It uses its rhetoric as an
Aristotelian “instrument of reason” to this end.
I have argued that, just as Herbert epitomizes in his lyrics a relatively unacknowledged, though persistently active, performative poetics, Donne epitomizes and recapitulates the equally important, yet more dominant, paideutic tradition. This tradition sees rhetoric as analytic, poetry as mimetic, and poetics as an art meant to train the ethical judgment and literary taste of those who belong to the governing class. It is, in short,
179 another way rhetoric adapts to—and even flourishes in—profoundly antidemocratic circumstances by means of its affinity with poetics.
Like performative rhetoric, paideutic rhetoric crystallized in early modern devotional verse. Devotional verse shares affinities with both the prayerful art of psalmic performance and the scriptural-sermonic art of grammatical/allegorical interpretation that formed the basis of Renaissance paideia. I have argued in the previous chapter that
Herbert’s devotional lyrics, having been adapted to function as liturgy, approach the type of performative epideictic we often associate with sophists. Donne, on the other hand, shares little concern for this kind of public performance. He instead wants to be interpreted and judged according to his poetic and ethical merits, and he used the practice of coterie exchange as a means to pose interpretive problems for his audience in order to invite such judgment.
Engaging in something like a manuscript-based dialectical exchange, Donne concerns himself with reaffirming—in often extraordinary poetic achievements—the intellectual, humanistic textual culture of the Renaissance. This situation allowed Donne to approach his own poetry in a quite modern, critical way. What Empson wrote about
Donne in this respect still holds good: “[c]ontroversy often strikes the observer as tedious, but the participant feels he is learning all the time. I now realize that I never really appreciated the poems until it became necessary to defend them.”85 Donne anticipates,
85 Empson, “Rescuing Donne,” 199. 180 indeed counts on, this recognition by critics such as Empson and others who find Donne rewarding because of a perceived need to defend him.
In part, this is because Donne is a poet interested in being judged according to principles of “literary criticism,” which in their nascent stage formed the basis of paideutic poetics. How well his formal innovations convey the quality of his intellectual conceits— how well he gets across the “idea of the work,”86 as Sidney would say—was foremost on his mind. In this sense, Donne is Sidney’s “right popular philosopher.” Donne, in short, is not a sophist.
86 Sidney, “Defence of Poetry,” 79. 181 Conclusion
Giambattista Vico, eighteenth-century Italian polymath and defender of Italy’s humanist legacy, claimed that “poetical genius is a gift from heaven, and there exists no instrument by which it can be attained.”1 The Renaissance would have accepted as valid only the first part of Vico’s statement. Though its dominant poetic theory understood poetry to deal in “only the semblance of truth,”2 as Vico would say, the Renaissance asked more of poetry than Vico’s eighteenth-century humanism: it served not only truth and the state, but other matters as well.
My aim has also been to show that the division of poetry into a humanist, paideutic art, on the one hand, and an art of performance, on the other, reveals that the Renaissance inherited the ancient problem—inaugurated by the rise of literacy and the “literaturization” of rhetoric in Ancient Greece and amplified by the split of rhetoric and poetics—of how to theorize poetry and rhetoric as separate arts. In neither performative nor paideutic poetics, though, was poetry conceived as autonomous or removed from culture. As both persuasive discourse and a preliminary to more serious dialectical and ethical instruction, poetry was situated in the contexts that defined its civic use. The “literary critical” practices of the aristocratic class were seen to exercise the same practical judgment used by that same class to govern. What was at issue was not whether poetry was fine art or whether it was defined by a particular aesthetic sensibility, but whether it was rhetorical, which really boils down
1 Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 41. 2 Vico, 43. 182 to a dispute over poetry’s status as a craft, a techne. The question was whether poetry could
“sit with the meanest of handmaids,” as Scott put it, an art similar to the “servile handicrafts.”
This dispute does, however, have ramifications for how we understand what
Abrams has called the “Copernican revolution in the theory of art”—the rise of aesthetics as an independent field of inquiry and the idea that the “fine” arts are sui generis expressions of human creativity distinct from the work of artisans.3 With the rise of the idea of the “beaux-arts”—which unified under one term the previously disparate and essentially functional crafts of poetry, painting, sculpture, and the like—writers like
Batteux, Diderot, and d’Alembert were able to advance a notion of “polite” taste distinct from the kind of prudential judgment argued for in the Renaissance. This leads to
“aesthetic” taste as Kant and Schiller understood it, a way of knowing that is independent from both science and ethics.4
I would argue that the development of the aesthetic represents an abstraction of the early modern idea of taste—i.e., prudential judgment—so that one’s “artistic” sense is rendered distinct from other forms of reasoning. Just as museums and concert halls were erected to house and showcase art separated from its cultural context, the faculty of artistic judgment is similarly partitioned: aesthetic taste came to be seen as separate from the kind
3 Abrams, “Art-as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics,” in Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Fischer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 140. 4 For a comprehensive account of the development of aesthetics and of art as a sui generis experience, see Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See also Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 163–227. 183 of reasoning involved in the technical and practical arts. In a sense, this evokes Aristotle, who understood poetic knowledge to constitute the theoretical category of the “poetic,” just as he understood rhetorical knowledge to constitute its own theoretical category, the
“rhetorical.” Poetry and rhetoric in the Renaissance, when understood as theoretical arts, indeed act as harbingers of this later system of fine art.
In a broader sense, what occurs in rhetoric and poetics is what Larry Shiner has called the “decontextualization” of art, its separation from the cultural activities from which art originates.5 “In 1500,” Peter Burke states, “popular culture was everyone’s culture; a second culture for the educated, and the only culture for everyone else. By 1800, however, in most parts of Europe, the clergy, the nobility, the merchants, the professional men . . . had abandoned popular culture to the lower classes.”6 Of course, this process was gradual, and, as we see with Donne, the exercise of taste derived its logic in part from the humanist classroom. Poetry in Donne’s time functioned as a rehearsal of a taste not yet divorced from its practical concerns, though it was heading in that direction. Herbert, on the other hand, fares considerably worse in a literary system of “art-as-such.” Because Herbert’s poetry was more fully integrated with early modern devotional practices, our urge to
“decontextualize” him does real harm. Lyric and other non-mimetic genres of poetry— even hymns and formalized prayer—in this sense fail to be recognized for the rhetorical- poetic crafts they are.
5 Shiner, Invention of Art. 6 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 366. 184 Paul Oskar Kristeller, who along with John Dewey was one of the first scholars to identify “fine art” as a problematic category, in a still-relevant essay notes the limitations fine art places on aesthetics in general:
A greater awareness of the different techniques of the various arts has produced dissatisfaction among artists and critics with the conventions of an aesthetic system based on a situation no longer existing, an aesthetics that is trying in vain to hide the fact that its underlying system is hardly more than a postulate and that most of its theories are abstracted from particular arts, usually poetry, and more or less inapplicable to the others . . . . In any case, these contemporary changes may help to open our eyes to an understanding of the historical origins and limitations of the modern system of the fine arts. Conversely, such historical understanding might help to free us from certain conventional preconceptions and to clarify our ideas on the present status and future prospects of the arts and of aesthetics.7
My hope is that certain aspects of Renaissance poetics that resist being categorized according to the “conventions of an aesthetic system based on a situation no longer existing,” once understood in light of the rhetorical tradition, might contribute to a greater understanding of the importance of the idea of craft, or techne. Poetry in the Renaissance was performed, used, taught, and held up as both a repository of commonplaces and a standard of eloquent discourse. In our modern vernacular culture, poetry has the ability to—and often does—function in these same ways, though it often goes unacknowledged for doing so.
One might be reminded of Shelley’s own Defence of Poetry, where poets are the
“unacknowledged legislators of the world.”8 Yet, for all the heroic posturing found in
Shelley’s Defence, his poet remains in the unenviable position of going unheard. We may
7 Kristeller, “Modern System of the Arts,” 227. See also John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953: 1934, Art as Experience, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 10 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). 8 Shelley, Complete Works, 7.20. 185 answer Shelley with Sidney, for whom the poet is still an artisan and, though he ranges
“only within the zodiac of his own wit,” in fact exemplifies for his audience a practical skillset. If we ignore poetry’s ability, that is, to act on persuadable audiences and rehearse communal values with a sense of immediacy, we risk Sidney’s curse “in the behalf of all poets”—“that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.”9
9 Sidney, “Defence of Poetry,” 121. 186 Bibliography
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