http://etext.virginia.edu/DicHist/alpha/A-B.html
An information recorder in alphabetical order.
Volumetric treasure beyond linear measure.
Poetry (Excerpt from the alphabetical URL)
"
At the end of the seventeenth century, poetry was
confronted with a new enemy. The rise of science and
the Cartesian philosophy induced many people, espe-
cially in France, to condemn poetry as a foolish and
useless relic of barbaric ages. This attitude charac-
terized some of the participants in the great quarrel
about the Ancients and the Moderns, e.g., Abbé Jean
Terrasson. Less extreme and therefore more dangerous
was the condescending tolerance of poetry as a social
amusement, expressed by Fontenelle. Against this de-
preciation old Boileau and young Voltaire protested
strongly. But early romantic writers accepted the chal-
lenge: poetry is, indeed, a creation of barbarism and
therefore admirable. The proclamation of this thesis
by Giambattista Vico (1730) and Thomas Blackwell
(1735) means the end of the concept of the
poeta doctus
and of European classicism.
3. The Craft of Poetry. The rising self-confidence
of poets in the late Middle Ages appears also in their
renewed insistence on inspiration. The poems of the
troubadours and of the
dolce stil nuovo are inspired
by Love and the Lady, as is Dante's
Vita nuova. In
the
Divina commedia (Divine Comedy), Dante's invo-
cations of Apollo and the Muses are no mere metaphors
but express his belief in the hidden truth of pagan
mythology. His poem is “sacred.”
In Petrarch, the idea of poetical ecstasy emerges
again, and in the fifteenth century the direct contact
with Plato makes the
furor poeticus a popular idea,
developed by Ficino and accepted by many poets and
critics, e.g., Scaliger, Ronsard, and Puttenham. This
does not imply, as in Plato, any negative or ironical
assessment of the poet's own activity, which on the
contrary is stressed to the utmost.
The poet is regarded as a second Creator, inferior
to God but akin to him. This divinization of Man as
Poet—later on applied to the artist—originated in
Florentine Platonism and was first stated by Christoforo
Landino (1481). It was inspired by Platonic and Her-
metic belief in the unique cosmic status of Man, by
Christian belief in a Creator, and by Plato's Demiurge.
The poet as creator became a metaphor popular with
many poets and critics, such as Scaliger, Tasso, and
Sidney, though mostly with reservations.
The theologians of the Reformation and the Counter-
Reformation could no more than their medieval pred-
ecessors accept profane poetry as inspired. Therefore,
in their great religious epics both Tasso and Milton
invoke a “Heavenly Muse.”
But even some critics like Castelvetro rejected
inspiration because it made poetics superfluous. Indeed,
a few libertines or freethinkers, like Pietro Aretino or
Giordano Bruno drew this conclusion. But most authors
combined faith in inspiration with obedience to tradi-
tion and the rules.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the idea
of poetical inspiration and creativity fades away. It is
taken for granted that the poet should be inspired,
particularly if he writes an ode and breaks into
“Pindaric frenzy.” But critics and readers smile or
frown at boasts of inspiration and find the usual invo-
cations frigid, as Shaftesbury did. To the new enemies
of poetry all talk of inspiration is silly.
Shaftesbury did not belong to them. In spite of his
attacks on “Enthousiasm,” his Soliloquy (1710) exalts
the Poet as Creator with a Renaissance fervor. We are
on the threshold of romanticism.
For all its glorification of the poet the Renaissance
did not call him a “genius.” The Latin word was used
but in the neutral sense of innate disposition, good or
bad. And it was thus used by Boileau and even by Dr.
Johnson. In seventeenth-century France, however,
génie was increasingly used in a positive sense, until
the Abbé Du Bos in his
Réflexions critiques sur la poésie
et la peinture (1719) gave it its present absolute mean-
ing. The romantic genius was born."