“The ear cannot respond surely to quantity and time where the tongue must follow the stress” is at once penetrative and, in the face of the classicists, daring. After conventional remarks on verse as expressing that harmony which in nature we see to be divine, and on the ancient relation to the dance, he finds the joining of lyre with song in ottava rima (77) and in stanza (86). The Greeks and Romans, using hexameter for all “three styles,” did not even adapt their verse to tragedy or to comedy (88*) by the length of the line. Our unrhymed verse (versi sciolti) is appropriate to proud and lofty emprise (88*). For purity of style it is not enough to be born in Tuscany. Seek usage in books (70*). Tuscan is not confined to Petrarch. He was pure and fluent above all others—and perhaps more timid than becomes a poet (71).
The treatment of imitation (69*, 70, 82) and of sentences (68*, 90*, 91, 93) is conventional. Sophistic appears in the recipes for verisimilitude through appropriateness (77-78) and in the recommendation of show-pieces (Aetna, winter, spring, etc. 83). But Muzio at once makes a significant addition. “You might yourself look at nature, not merely seek it in books. Learn what to dilate, what to compress.” As examples of the force of restraint (84) he cites Vergil’s mating of Dido and Aeneas in the cave and Dante’s Paolo and Francesca.
5. FRACASTORO
A Latin dialogue (1555) by Girolamo Fracastoro discusses poetry as a form of eloquence, merging poetic in rhetoric (Hieronymi Fracastorii Naugerius sive de poetica dialogus ... with an English translation by Ruth Kelso and an introduction by Murray W. Bundy, University of Illinois Press, 1924). Ciceronian in type, it is clearly ordered and composed, and agreeably fluent in style. Fracastoro’s motive is not professional. Scientist and philosopher, he turns to poetry as to an important item in culture and a suggestive topic for discussion. So approached by not a few Renaissance scholars, it imposed no obligation to advance critical theory.
6. PELETIER
L’Art poétique of Jacques Peletier du Mans is a similar excursion of a scholar into literature. Philosopher and mathematician as Fracastoro, interested in languages, professor, promoter of normalized spelling, he was known, by that adjective dear to the French Renaissance, as “docte Peletier.” His literary associations were first with Ronsard and Du Bellay under Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret; later he had associations in Lyon, where Jean de Tournes published his treatise in 1555 (L’art poëtique ... publié d’après l’édition unique avec introduction et commentaire [par] André Boulanger, Paris, 1930).
His editor, regarding it as the best formulation of the Pléiade movement, notes that it relies on Horace’s “Ars poetica” [which Peletier had translated ten years before], Cicero, and Quintilian, that it uses no Greek source and of the Italians only Vida, that the great model is Vergil, and that the section on dramaturgy is slight and feeble. He sums up the doctrine as: (1) use your vernacular and enrich it; (2) imitate the ancients; (3) imitate nature; (4) cultivate the high poetic forms urged by the Pléiade.
The little that Peletier has to say on poetic composition is all rhetoric. He makes, for example, the usual transfer of the counsels for exordium to the opening of a poem. He shows the sophistic slant in turning to encomium the Horatian commonplace that poets are givers of fame (71, 82, 89, 176) and in the stock show-pieces (127). He is more distinctive on rhyme (149), on classification of meters by the number of syllables (153), and on imitation of classical verse forms (159). He occasionally cites Ariosto (103, 201) and discusses both the sonnet and the ode (169, 172).