The Early-Modernization of the Classical Muse." (2014)
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CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by University of New Mexico University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 9-12-2014 The aE rly-Modernization of the Classical Muse Bruce Carroll Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Recommended Citation Carroll, Bruce. "The Early-Modernization of the Classical Muse." (2014). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/29 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Bruce Carroll Candidate English Language and Literature Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Lorenzo Garcia, Jr., Chairperson Angus Fletcher Marissa Greenberg Timothy Graham ii THE EARLY-MODERNIZATION OF THE CLASSICAL MUSE By Bruce Carroll B.A., English Literature, University of St. Thomas, 2003 M.A., Literature, University of Dallas, 2007 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2014 iii Acknowledgements This dissertation is indebted to the constant support of Angus and Michelle Fletcher. Another sine qua non, Lorenzo Garcia, Jr., very generously stepped in during the last year and made possible everything since. iv THE EARLY MODERNIZATION OF THE CLASSICAL MUSE by Bruce Carroll B.A., English Literature, University of St. Thomas, 2003 M.A., Literature, University of Dallas, 2007 Ph.D., English, University of New Mexico, 2014 ABSTRACT The Early-Modernization of the Classical Muse juxtaposes ancient and Renaissance uses of the Muse to retrieve her from the status of mere literary convention. I draw on Hans Blumenberg’s ‘reoccupation’ (Umbesetzung) thesis, which locates in philosophy concerns originally raised in myth, to argue that the poet’s relationship with his Muse, as the perceived source of his art form, was always somehow ontological (ontology: the theory of human being). In the pre-literate, pre-philosophical invocations of archaic figures like Homer and Hesiod, I locate the ‘ontological stirrings’ in which the poet identifies his self through his at times troublesome and combative dependence on the Muse. By early modernity, a philosophical era, the classical Muse’s appearances figure radical and imminently modern shifts in a still-persistent essentialist ontology. Here poets assert a re-orientation to the human person, a new ontology centered not on humanity’s quondam dependence on nature, the deified genetrix overseeing all sublunary production (including poetry), but on an independent human production, so that techne, or art, becomes not only the prime factor in the recognition of human being but also the vehicle for its re-orientation. v A chief contribution of this dissertation is its identification of an ontological poetics. Impossible outside of poetic language, this poetics employs inversions of conceit and discontinuous rhetorical structures to raze the vertical scales that placed causes (like nature or the Muse) over their effects (the poet and poetry). Ontological poetics forwards instead a horizontal ontology based on lateral connections among the poet-speaker, his beloved poetic subject, and the poem itself. A critical novelty of this project is that unlike in any of Blumenberg’s examples of reoccupation, these analyses must consider the return of a myth within the era of philosophy. Because the appearances of the Muse in early modern poetry embody the basic ontological issues that the era of philosophy originally inherited from her, her early modern situation acts as an acid test for Blumenberg’s thesis. vi Table of Contents Part I Chapter 1: Introduction .............................................................................................. 1 Chapter 2: History and Hierarchy ...................................................................................... 15 Archaic Poets .............................................................................................................. 18 Sirens ............................................................................................................. 25 Hesiod ............................................................................................................. 29 Pindar ............................................................................................................. 33 Latin Poets .................................................................................................................. 37 Persius ............................................................................................................. 38 Virgil ............................................................................................................. 41 Ovid ............................................................................................................. 44 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 49 Chapter 3: Metaphysics and Making .................................................................................. 51 Chapter 4: Conception and Application ............................................................................. 67 Conception .................................................................................................................. 70 Application .................................................................................................................. 80 Chapter 5: Diffusion into Theory ........................................................................................ 93 Visual Art Theory ....................................................................................................... 96 Poetic Theory ............................................................................................................ 103 Part II Chapter 6: The Unread Muse ............................................................................... 118 Chapter 7: The Ontological Quest..................................................................................... 130 Chapter 8: The Muse Position ........................................................................................... 153 Chapter 9: The Sonnets’ Muse .......................................................................................... 168 vii Chapter 10: Shakespeare’s Ontological Poetics ............................................................... 181 Notes ................................................................................................................................... 202 Works Cited ......................................................................................................................... 224 1 Part I Chapter 1: Introduction The rondel above depicts the Muse of poetry who occupies one of the four center positions of the ceiling of Raphael’s Vatican Stanza della Segnatura.1 She wears the laurel wreath of her counterpart Apollo, his symbol popularized by the Homeridae, the rhapsode descendants of Homer,2 whose bust adorns the arm of the Muse’s throne. The white blouse and dark sash recall her liminal place between upper and lower worlds. By association with her mother, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, she had access to the underworld’s river Lethe (oblivion) the waters of which surfaced in the earthly Heliconian springs that she founded her cult of the arts around.3 Thus her office both governed poetry’s ability to bring about forgetfulness of cares and granted the poet’s need for a surplus of memory in his oral performances of memorized epic. Her wings, loaded with iconographic allusion, may result from Ovid’s tale of the Muses who turned the hubristic Pierides into crows, or they may reflect a conflation of the Muses and the winged Sirens as old as Plato (Republic 10.617b).4 The two putti who flank her hold plaques reading numine afflatur (inspired or breathed upon by the spirit), which recalls Marsilio Ficino’s then still popular furor poeticus,5 the Renaissance understanding of poetic inspiration as a kind of religious frenzy thought to 2 descend from Hesiod’s 8th century BCE initiation by the Muses who breathed into him the gift of song (Theogony 1-115). A rich collection of reference, this one panel of the Stanza cites half a dozen contemporary and classical authors and emblematizes the humanist fetishization of learning. More significantly, in the harp pulled back in the Muse’s left hand and the codex thrust forward in her right, the panel manages to capture the two principal eras of intellectual history at the time of its composition. Used by poetic singers, the aoidoi of Homer’s, Hesiod’s, and Pindar’s archaic Greek era, the harp accompanied a primary oral culture’s poetry which, prior to the advent of writing, was set to music to aid in memorization. Because of her intimate association with memory one may think of the Muse as a personification of information technology. It was within her that the poet’s unwritten song was stored and through her that it was accessed again and again. In his in-depth study of Greek oral culture, Walter J. Ong identifies the poet’s