“How the wilde and sauage people vsed a naturall poesie in versicle and rime as our vulgar is” (chapter v); and “How the riming poesie came first to the Grecians and Latins, and had altered and almost spilt their maner of poesie” (chapter vi). Classification into heroic, lyric, etc., and then into comedy, tragedy, ode, elegy, etc., is followed (chapter xxxi) by a review of English poetry as meager for a roll of honor as it is undiscriminating in criticism.
Book II, Proportion Poeticall, is a misguided prosody. “Proportion” is exhibited (chapter ii) in “staff” (i.e., stave or stanza); (iii) in “measure” (i.e., feet) estimated by the number of syllables without assigning a distinct function to “accent”; (v) in caesura ranged with “comma, colon, periodus,” terms transferred from rhetoric to serve as aspects of rhythm; (vi and following) in “concord,” which includes rime, accent, time, “stir,” and “cadence”; (xi) in “position”; and finally in “figure,” square stanzas, triangles, ovals, suitable to emblems and other devices. Through this confusion and deviation the typical English stress habit glimmers so faintly as never to be distinct. “How Greek and Latin feet might be applied in English” (xiii) leads in the closing chapters to “a more particular declaration of the metrical feet of the ancient poets.”
Book III, Ornament, is a long and elaborate classification of figures of speech.[60] It ends conventionally with typical faults, with decorum, and, in tardy caution, with Horace’s ars celare artem.
At the end of the sixteenth century, then, these Englishmen could still assume, with Ascham fifty years earlier, that English poetry had no valid tradition of its own, still seek to revive it by classicism. That classicism should be not only revival of ancient stanza and imitation of ancient style, as with the Pléiade, but even conformity to ancient metric might rather have been proposed in France or Italy, where vernacular verse had kept much of the Latin rhythmical habit. In England, where the vernacular tradition determined the verse pattern by the Germanic habit of stress, the proposal was foredoomed as futile. The insistence of the classical cult nevertheless lingers in serious discussion. The correspondence of Gabriel Harvey with Spenser on this point may be playful, or even partly satirical; but Harvey was a fanatic, and even Spenser sometimes read Chaucer’s verse strangely, sometimes in his poetical youth made strange experiments. The item that lingered longest in discussion, perhaps because it was common to both verse traditions, is rhyme. Thomas Campion’s Arte of English Poesie (1602)[61] attacked this specifically and with more understanding of English rhythms than Webbe had or Puttenham. Samuel Daniel replied with a correct but feeble Defence of Ryme (1603).[62] Classicism could attempt to deviate English verse the more easily when even poets and men of some learning did not understand the linguistic development of their own vernacular.
13. PATRIZZI
Patrizzi’s poetic (Della poetica di Francesco Patrici la deca disputata ... Ferrara, 1586) renews the quarrel with Aristotle begun in his rhetoric.
The sub-title goes on: “in which by history, by arguments, and by authority of the great ancients is shown the falsity of the opinions most accepted in our times concerning poetic. There is added the Trimerone of the same author in reply to the objections raised by Signor Torquato Tasso[63] against his defence of Ariosto.” The ten sections severally inquire: I concerning poetic inspiration (furore poetico), II whether poetry originated in the causes assigned by Aristotle, III whether poetry is imitation, IV whether the poet is an imitator, V whether poetry can be written in prose, VI whether plot (favola) is rather distinctive of the poet than verse, VII whether Empedocles as a poet was inferior to Homer, VIII whether poetry can be made from history, IX whether ancient poems imitated by harmony and rhythm, X whether the modes of imitation are three.
The divisions obviously overlap, and there is confusion in VII (152) between the origin of poetry and its essential character, in VIII (168) between historical material and history. Section VIII also misses the point of Aristotle’s creative characterization for poetic consistency. These misinterpretations, common enough at the time, are due with Patrizzi to his missing Aristotle’s idea of imitation as the distinctive poetic form of composition. Aristotle thinking of composition remains dark or wrong to Patrizzi thinking of style.[64] Thus he is typical of that general Renaissance difficulty with Aristotle which came from looking the other way. Even after Tasso and Castelvetro, Renaissance poetic kept its preoccupation with style.