Minturno made his more comprehensive and influential Latin dialogue on classical poetic, De poeta, a collection of six monologues, or essays, with enough question and objection for occasional reminder of the literary form, but with little real discussion (Antonii Sebastiani Minturni de poeta ... libri sex, Venice, 1559). The setting, a villa by the sea, is elaborately described in the introduction. The style, oratorical and inclined to Ciceronianism, is throughout elaborate and diffuse, each noun being habitually escorted by two adjectives. What is thus conveyed with much repetition is generally Horace’s “Ars poetica” once more, Cicero, and Quintilian; but there is also considerable use, though little comprehension, of Aristotle’s Poetic. Aristotle’s conception of poetry as a distinct kind of composition has not yet arrived; and poetic style, which is Minturno’s actual subject, is conceived in the terms of rhetoric. The spokesmen are: Book I Sincerus (Sannazaro) on What is poetry?; Book II Pontanus (recalled, not present) on What is poetic?; Book III Vopiscus on tragedy; Book IV Gauricus on comedy; Book V Carbo on lyric; Book VI Sincerus on style. The quotations adduced on the first two hundred pages show the following proportions: Vergil above all (Bucolics, 55 lines; Georgics, 10 lines; Aeneid, 512 lines); Seneca, 101; Horace (mainly “Ars poetica”), 99; Euripides (in Latin), 68; Sophocles (in Latin), 23.
I. What is poetry? It is a furor coelestis. Wisdom and eloquence being one, all who had it used to be called poets (Moses, Theseus, Lycurgus, Solon); for poetry was the only art of speech. Recovering now from medieval darkness, we see Vergil as the exemplar of everything, Homer as comprehending all philosophy. Poetry is imitation of nature [apparently conceived as description]. Therefore Plato’s exclusion is rejected. The imitation is narrative in epic, through personae in dramatic poetry, and a combination of the two in melic. That poetry is like painting (Horace’s “ut pictura poesis”) is agreed. Poets seek variety rather than sequence, and prefer violent or otherwise disturbed states of mind, considering the [rhetorical] headings of appropriateness to habit, place, and time. Plato’s preference of epic is approved against Aristotle’s of tragedy.
II. What is poetic? [The implication of this book, as throughout, is that poetic is rhetoric.] The ancient poets thought their distinction to be not in verse, but in lore of astronomy, optics, music, logic, history, geography. In ratio dicendi historians are likest to poets. Vergil was expert in rhetoric and logic as well as in cosmogony, morals, law and polity, medicine, athletics, etc. Poetry belongs under ratio civilis. Its object is to teach, to delight, to move [the stock summary for oratory]. It must command the “three styles” in order to be always appropriate. The natural objection of Traianus that this seems to be all rhetoric is answered by citing the distinction of verse, by slipping back to the “three styles,” and, as in a sort of desperation, by saying that the poet’s distinctive gift is to move men to wonder (admiratio). [Not only is this pure sophistic, but Minturno’s floundering is due to his seeing no distinction at all. He always falls back on rhetoric.] The poet, no less than the orator, must command inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio. Tragedy is discussed as a poem with parts like those of a speech and with descriptive amplification. Its personae are to be fashioned through the headings of rhetoric. “The other parts of an oration with which the orator is concerned, division, confirmation, rebuttal, conclusion, peroration, must also be observed (tenendae) by the poet.”
A book inquiring what poetic is, including tragedy, and quoting Aristotle, has not the faintest suggestion of a distinctive poetic composition! It can translate Aristotle’s complication and solution without seeing that his mainspring is sequence, and consider his “recognition” as a means of display.
Once more we are told that characterization must be true in the sense of being true to type: Aeneas consistently pius et fortis, Achilles iracundus et magnanimus, Ulysses prudens et callidus, according to the headings of rhetoric. After a few vague precepts on arrangement, and one more reminder of the “three styles,” a close is at last found in the epic eminence of Vergil.
III. (Tragedy) is again conventional. With little use of Aristotle, it reverts to Horace and Seneca, and repeats the rhetorical doctrine of types. Tragedy is found to consist of plot, character, words, and pregnant sentences (fabula, mores, verba, sententiae). Its externals are described, its parts enumerated, its origin summarized. It should have five acts of not more than ten scenes each. Its style should be graphically vivid. [To this counsel of rhetoric, which applies to drama only in the reports of messengers, no hint is added of the distinctive quality of dramatic dialogue.]
IV. (Comedy) after a review of the history of comedy and an enumeration of its typical personae, is devoted largely to a long list of figures used for comic effect, and closes with enumeration of its parts.
V. (Lyric) after a long introduction on convivium, with quotations from the poets, distinguishes melic from dithyrambic and nomic, and finds that lyric has as many components as drama (fabula, mores, verba, sententiae!). Its forms are ode (with epode and palinode), satiric iambs, elegy (nenia, epicedium, epitaphium, epithanatium), epigram in the Greek sense, and satire.
VI. (Style) is a summary of the section on style in any classical rhetoric, with classified examples and with the usual lists of figures.
What is the result of these 570 pages? Five men of letters, besides the author, have roles in a sort of published academy; and several others at least take a hand. They have no new ideas, except certain Aristotelian inklings that hardly seem to fit. But they are learned in rhetoric. They begin with the convention of the original dominance of poetry; they end with sixty-two figures of speech. The subject is reviewed; it is not advanced. As guidance for Latin poets—but that is hardly intended. As inspiration this oratory is much feebler than Poliziano’s; and it never even approaches that brief, anonymous ancient prose poem περι ὕψους, De sublimitate, “on reaching up.”[54]