The very early use of ‘maker,’ as equivalent to poet, and ‘to make’ as applied to the exercise of the poet’s art, is evidence that the words are of genuine home-growth, and not mere imitations of the Greek ποιητής and ποιεῖν, which Sir Philip Sidney, as will be seen below, suggests as possible. The words, like the French ‘trouvère’ and ‘troubadour,’ the O.H.G. ‘scof,’ and the O.E. ‘sceop,’ mark men’s sense that invention, and in a certain sense, creation, is the essential character of the poet. The quotation from Chaucer will sufficiently prove how entirely mistaken Sir John Harington was, when he affirmed (Apology for Poetry, p. 2) that Puttenham in his Art of English Poesy, 1589, was the first who gave ‘make’ and ‘maker’ this meaning. Sir Walter Scott somewhere claims them as Scotticisms; but exclusively such they certainly are not.
And eke to me hit is a greet penaunce,
Sith rym in English hath swich scarsitee,
To folowe word by word the curiositee
Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce.
Chaucer, Compleynt of Venus, 79 (Skeat).
The God of shepherds, Tityrus, is dead,
Who taught me homely, as I can, to make.
Spenser, The Shepherd’s Calendar, June.
The old famous poete Chaucer, for his excellencie and wonderful skil in making, his scholler Lidgate (a worthy scholler of so excellent a maister) calleth the Loadestarre of our language.—E. K., Epistle Dedicatory to Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar.