Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance / A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism

by Donald Lemen Clark

2. "Longinus"

Aristotle's theory of poetry, which influenced so profoundly the criticism of the renaissance, was not followed by other classical treatises of the same scope. In fact, very little Greek or Roman literary criticism is concerned with poetical theory as compared with the keen interest of many critics in oratory. Perhaps the most significant and valuable critical treatise after Aristotle is that golden pamphlet On the Sublime erroneously ascribed to Longinus, which, anonymous and mutilated as it is, still holds our attention by its sincerity, insight, and enthusiastic love for great poetry.

However important its contribution to classical theory of poetry, the treatise is not specifically on poetic. In fact, it sets out as if to treat rhetoric, and actually treats both; for it is mainly a treatise on style, which as Aristotle says in the Poetics[[27]] is in essence the same both in prose and verse. Nevertheless it does distinguish between rhetoric and poetic and does contribute to the theory of poetry.[[28]]

"Sublimitas," misleadingly translated "sublimity," the author defines as elevation and greatness of style. It springs from the faculty of grasping great conceptions and from passion, both gifts of nature. It is assisted by art through the appropriate use of figures, noble diction, and dignified and spirited composition of the words into sentences. It is the insistence on passion, emotion, which makes the treatise On the Sublime stand out above other classical treatises on writing. Both poets and orators attain the sublime, says the author, but passion is more characteristic of the poets.[[29]]

Passion moves the poet to intensity, which is attained by selection of those sensory images which are significant. Thus the treatise praises the ode by Sappho which it quotes, because the poet has taken the emotions incident to the frenzy of love from the attendant symptoms, from actuality, and first selected and then closely combined those which were conspicuous and intense.[[30]] This intensity which is characteristic of the poet he contrasts with the amplification of the orators, which strengthens the fabric of an argument by insistence and is especially "appropriate in perorations and digressions, and in all passages written for the style and for display, in writings of historical and scientific nature." Yet Demosthenes when moved by passion attains the sublimity of intensity and strikes like lightning.[[31]] Both in oratory and in poetry sublimity is attained by image-making, as when "moved by enthusiasm and passion, you seem to see the things of which you speak, and place them under the eyes of your hearers."[[32]] It would be difficult to phrase better the conditions of imaginative realization. But the author felt truly that this realization was different in poetry from what it was in rhetoric. In commenting on a quotation from the Orestes, of Euripides, he says:

There the poet saw the Furies with his own eyes, and what his imagination presented he almost compelled his hearers to behold.

And after an imaginative passage from the lost Phaethon, of the same author, he says:

Would you not say that the soul of the writer treads the car with the driver, and shares the peril, and wears wings as the horses do?

From this the rhetorical imagination differs in that it is at its best when it has fact for its object.[[33]] Longinus would seem to say that the realization of poetic is untrammeled by fact, while the imagination of the orator is bound by the actual; it is always practical.

Because the imaginative realization of poetry is characterized by passion, intensity, and immediacy, the author of the treatise feels with Aristotle that the dramatic is the most characteristically poetic. On this basis he judges the Odyssey to be less great than the Iliad. It is narrative instead of dramatic; fable prevails over action; passion has degenerated into character-drawing. This grouping of drama, action, and passion as the qualities of great poetry is significant. Bald narrative can never realize character or situation as can the dramatic form, either in narrative or for the stage, when the whole action takes place before the mind's eye instead of being told.