poesie and poetrie The Idea of the Vernacular s glossary is one of the inspirations which lie behind my own current project, the building of a glossary of the technical terms used in England and Scotland in the later Middle Ages for elements of poetic form, especially stanza-form, alliteration and rhyme, and metre and rhythm. One task I set myself was to see if poesie and poetrie were used to refer to form (i.e. to the difference between prose and poetry) in Middle English. It turns out that they don t really gain this connotation of poetic form until later, but they do preserve a specific meaning relating to metaphor and figuration. What follows is first a guided tour around poesie and poetrie in later fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth-century English. I ll then explore a particular textual locus which hinges on the opposition of false and true poesie. The Idea of the Vernacular glossary and the Middle English Dictionary give a good sense of what medieval readers and writers would have understood by poesie and poetrie. They define both terms as referring to poetry in general, to classical poetry in particular, and especially to figurative language and fables (i.e. mythic or impossible subject-matter). You can see here a series of metonymic relationships between the overall category, poetry, classical poetry, and some of its defining features, figures of thought, metaphor, fables. Poetrie also operates relationally, as a term contrasting with other terms. Glending Olson has differentiated making and poetry in English, and Sarah Kay and Adrian Armstrong have teased apart verse and poetrie in French. Making and verse describe the technical expertise of versification, not so much the content but the mode of composition. Poetrie and poesie in contrast, refer to writing about classical learning, often writing metaphorically and allegorically, an activity with moral and philosophical purpose. As Kay and Armstrong put it in their summary of what this term meant to readers and writers in later medieval France, it is a style of writing that relies on figural complexity, and is potentially expressive of philosophical meaning The features that typify poetrie are the use of classical myths, sustained personification, or forms of extended metaphor: devices constitutive of what we might call allegory. Though initially restricted to ancient writers, the work of Machaut, Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer, amongst others, took on some or all of these elements, and hence was labelled as poetry by themselves and by others. With a broad definition in place and the oppositional relation to verse and making established, it might seem unnecessarily geeky to pore over individual usages. But looking at specific instances allows us to explore when an author chooses to use a word and why. Each usage is, in effect, a moment of miniaturized literary theory via nomenclature, as authors decide which word to attach to which thing in which context. As they transliterate literary-theoretical terms into English, authors expand a term s meaning or restrict it. They gloss or exemplify it, or use the term to explain the status of something in their own narrative. Each instance tells us something about an author s training and the technical registers of literary theory with which they are familiar. Without paying attention to such matters of register and training, editorial glossing 1
often blurs what is being said from specificity into what looks like tautology or generic utterance. We are sometimes in danger of failing to see Middle English literary theory (or at least transliterated theory from other languages) because we read its lexis too generically. It s striking that in many of the Middle English usages of poesie the referent stays fairly restricted and often clearly signalled in situ. As you can see from the entries on the handout, the term is often used to label very specific elements of classical writing, especially that concerning mythic or fantastical subjects (in particular the naming and representation of pagan deities; stellification; magic and sorcery). Gower restricts the word to his Ovidian source material, usually incidents of metamorphosis, carefully signalling that the narrative that follows needs to be read as poetrie. Chaucer, Lydgate and the author of the Gest Hystoriale use the word to rationalise the appearance of impossible events in myth, especially stellification (e.g. Castor and Pollux), magic (for example, Medea s ability to move the moon and stars) and metamorphoses of various kinds. One way to explain such seemingly impossible subject matter was to read it as figuration rather than literal language. Following Lactantius, as Nicolette Zeeman has so wonderfully explained, poets were understood to have the poetic licence to transpose or turn literal, truthful representation into oblique or ambiguous figuration. What distinguishes poetry, as the Eagle s modesty topos in the House of Fame makes clear, is figures, as opposed to philosophy s terms or rhetoric s colours. Though seemingly impossible, poetry s figures are not merely fictive or obviously mendacious but rather truths treated obliquely, transferred from literal to figurative, or covered over by a veil of figuration. Poetrie (see iii.) is correspondingly used not only to describe these features as they were perceived in classical poetry, but also in post-classical allegories in which such veiled truths were intentional, and also the allegorical exposition of such hidden or figured truths. Lydgate, describing all of the stories painted on the Temple of Glass, reserves the word poesie for Martianus Capella s Wedding of Philology and Mercury, a text notable for its allegory. Likewise, he cites as poesies those elements of myths which are expounded by Fulgentius in his Mythologies and by Boccaccio in the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods. At times, poesie s meaning is entirely pejorative. Given its associations with metaphorical or oblique meaning which is figurative rather than literal, it s perhaps not surprising that it is used by both Hoccleve and Usk to refer to language which sounds sweet and attractive in its subtlety and intricacy, but which is not only empty of meaning but dangerously capable of persuading or deceiving. Both also use poesie more neutrally, Usk to refer to the subject matter of French verse, poyse-matter, and Hoccleve to celebrate Chaucer for following in Virgil s footsteps in poesie. But given Hoccleve s lack of interest in classical myth elsewhere in his poetry, it is not clear that he would want to follow in Virgil and Chaucer s footsteps. Hoccleve s reluctance to use these words makes one very conscious of what we might characterise as his resistance to classical poesie in favour of scriptural and regiminal advice, matters of canon law and 2
ecclesiastical history, and devotional and moral religious writing, despite all that he had learned as Chaucer s poetic apprentice. Usk and Hoccleve s rejection of poesie, both lexically and conceptually, may reflect their scribal, rather than academic, training (though Chaucer, notably, was, it seems, self-taught in poesie and Hoccleve himself had been bequeathed a copy of De bello Troie by Guy de Rouclif, a senior Privy Seal clerk in 1392). So Hoccleve would likely have known in some form the key discussion of the nature of poetry in the Prologue of Guido delle Colonne s Historia destructionis Troie, to which I will now turn. This discussion found its way into Middle English via translation of Guido s text and via reference to it in Chaucer s House of Fame. You will all be able to recite with me the comments of the anonymous Trojan poet jostling for position on the pillar of iron: Oon seyde that Omer made lyes, Feynynge in hys poetries, And was to Grekes favourable; Therfor held he hyt but fable. At a glance, this might seem to contain a fair amount of tautology. Yet Homer is accused of not one thing but several in sequence. First, he lied, rather than telling the truth in some literal or metaphorical form; (ii) next he did so whilst feigning, that is using poetic licence to transfer material from one form to another, to represent things obliquely or ambiguously; (iii) he did such feigning within his poetries (i.e. within poetic licence, exactly where one might expect such fiction); (iv) in addition to lying, he was biaised towards the Greeks. The unnamed speaker, considering all this in toto, decides that Homer (or at least a projection of Homer) was nothing but fable, that it is a story with no truth, a story which is all fantasy (in contrast to a history or to an argumentum, a realistic fiction). As is well known, Chaucer here draws on the prologues of Benoît de Sainte-Maure s Roman de Troie and Guido s Historia. Benoît s prologue alleges that Homer had not told the truth, not surprisingly, because he was not an eye-witness. Some readers, because Homer had men fight with gods, rejected Homer s account in its entirety. This paves the way for the miraculous rediscovery of the supposed eye-witness Dares, rediscovered by Cornelius and supposedly translated word for word by Benoît. The author of the Ovide Moralisé criticizes Benoît for this account, arguing that Homer spoke in metaphor ( il parla par metaphore ). Guido too teases out (that is, adds in) a literary and linguistic explanation for these two types of Trojan narrative, one poetic and one historical. For Guido, those Trojan poets enacted a switch in mode from history to poetry. Then, as might be expected of poetry, they were licensed to use fanciful inventions, inventions which are figurata, figurative. Audiences, says Guido, following Benoît, might easily reject this as simple fantasy, but if they do so they are missing the point about the difference between poetry and history. Guido, as chronicler-historian, will re-transform the narrative back towards truthful 3
history (Meek s notes and Strohm). Chaucer s unnamed Trojan poet is thus closer to Guido and Benoît s mistaken audience in his view of Homer. What looks superficially like a slur about Homer s truthfulness or capacity for accuracy, is equally about an audience s capacity to recognise and understand the transformations of metaphor. Given that neither Homer nor the audience (whether imagined en masse or one as anonymous commentator) existed more as ideas than realities, these prologues, and Chaucer s riff on them, use Homer to think through the challenges of poesie in the Trojan narrative, whether Achilles was chivalrous for example, what to make of Medea, what to make of Ovidian and Virgilian material which related to this narrative. When Lydgate translates and expands this passage in the Prologue to the Troy Book, like Benoît and Guido he uses the notional Homer as a stooge to celebrate and distinguish his own project. Some Trojan authors lied, says Lydgate, and were not faithful eye-witnesses. They transformed, i.e. they metamorphosed the truth of the Trojan story, as they were entitled to do in their poetry, but they did so by means of vain rather than profitable fables. Vain fables may sound like a tautology, but in fact it tries to pin down exactly what category Chaucer s poet had arrived at: fabulation which does not veil or obliquely represent truth and is hence empty or useless. Lydgate then adds to Guido s account the particular linguistic mechanism by which some Trojan poems might be imagined to have gone wrong. They made these futile fictions by false transumpcioun, fake transumptio. Transumptio, as the notes to this Prologue in the Idea of the Vernacular explain, is the Latin equivalent of metalepsis, a farfetched metaphor or one in which more than one metaphorical substitution is made. Rather than hiding truth under the cloak or cloud of poetry in such a way that its allegorical or moral meaning can be rediscovered (this would be true hiding ), by such fake transumptio they hide falsely, they shroud truth maliciously. Shrouded rather than clouded, killed off rather than veiled, truth is inaccessible by any means. Lydgate expands on Guido s depiction of Homer s potentially deceptive poetry. Homer has transformed the truth from history to poetry, as he was entitled to do, but he had done so other than the trouthe was / And feyned falsly. Homer s fake poetry, created by false metaphor, then mutates into false language which is simply flattery. Lydgate imagines Homer as a flatterer, with his poetry becoming something more like Hoccleve s deceptive blandishment. This tells us not so very much about Homer, but everything about Lydgate s positioning of his poetry and the promotion of truth-telling poetry in newly Lancastrian England. This imagined Homer is thus employed as diametric contrast for Guido and Lydgate. Guido labours, Lydgate says, not to transmwe any aspect of the story. This word is often glossed as alter or change, but it again refers precisely to language which can be interpreted as figurative, metamorphosis in particular: he has not mutated any aspect. Guido does not rely on either flattery or false metaphor and elaborate metonymy, like the imagined Trojan poets, or even straightforward metaphor and figuration. In their place, Guido, and following him Lydgate, grafts in rhetorical colours and flowers of eloquence, a grafting which leaves the history of Troy 4
unmutated. Cadence is here used very accurately to refer to the cursus patterns which Guido used in his prose and which Lydgate had learned during his own training in rhetoric in Oxford. Martin Camargo s researches have shown that Guido s Historia was one of the texts often included in the anthologies which he calls Oxford Readers, used by students and teachers of the Master of Arts course, and by Benedictine monks teaching arts to junior monks before they went on to study theology or canon law. Such readers were also kept as a kind of style sheet or reference manual by aspiring arts masters, lawyers, medical doctors, and theologians. Lydgate amplifies and fully theorises Guido s discussion in light of his own education and understanding. He endorses poetry which is not poesie (i.e. not metaphorical, not requiring unveiling), preferring rhetorical and dictaminal flowers and colours which decorate verse whose meanings, ethical and moral, are written into the text by the narrating voice. Where such poesie remains in his narratives (i.e. Mercury s appearance or the raising of the Theban walls), Lydgate deploys the term very explicitly to demarcate its interpretation. As I hope to have shown, such references are not tautologous or generic, but literary theory in action. Tracking the referents of words like poesie and poetrie allows us access to these authors understanding of literary theory, shaped by their own training and education. It shows us their attitudes to their inheritance both from classical writers and from the authors of the 1380s (most obviously dream-vision, allegory, personification, classical myth and the stuff of poesie in the senses I have discussed here). Many fifteenth-century clerk-poets drew on their literary-theoretical training to make sense of Chaucer s fashionable poetry and to work out how to combine his subject-matter, form and language with their own skills and instincts. What should English poetry be, they ask themselves, their patrons and their readers: translation or transformation, fable or history, personificationallegory or love visions of knights and ladies, metaphorical or rhetorical, fake poetry or true? 5