The Columbia History of British Poetry by Carl Woodring, James Shapiro Read Free Book Online Page A

verse. Boethius counted as a philosopher, but his Consolation of Philosophy contains many poems. Parts of the Bible were in some sense poetic, which put poetry within

 

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striking distance of theology. Definitions of poetry were confusing. The body of classical poetry embedded in the educational system differed from prose on the one hand by virtue of being written in meter; on the other it differed from more serious kinds of writing by virtue of its subject matter: it was full of fables, myths, impossible marvels, and monsters that seemed improbable even to the zoologically credulous Middle Ages. There was no necessary connection between metrics and fabulous subject matter, the two main features of poetry.
The encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264) included both views in his Speculum Doctrinale ; poetry is first "the art of adorning something with metre, according to the proportion of the words and the length and number of the metrical feet" (III.cix)a pedestrian definition that is widespread. The fifteenth-century English translation of Palladius into rather painful verse and perhaps quite a lot of Lydgate suffer under the misapprehension that a poet's task is essentially one of versifying. It was a comfortingly utilitarian point of view: verse was easier to learn than prose, and the Bible contained lost Hebrew meters. There could be nothing essentially wrong with poetry seen simply as versification.
The other aspect of poetryits fabulous subject matterwas much more difficult to deal with. Since medieval views of life did not suffer from our prevailing sense of the indeterminacy of things, God was a reality, and life on earth was a prologue to an eternity in hell or heaven; what we call "the real world" today was to be regarded as a temporary and seductive maze of illusions, through which each soul must find its way to truth. The way to heaven and hell was relatively clearly marked out by divine revelation (the Bible) and the authority of the Church, embodied in the clerical establishment, who were alone qualified to expound the Bible and the writings of the ecclesiastical authoritiesor indeed any other writings. It is difficult to fit the subject matter of poetry into this scheme of things, unless the poetry is to be relentlessly didactic. Some poetic featuresits figures of speech, for examplecan be accommodated easily enough: they render the message more efficacious; but any subject matter that did not seem essentially Christian, moral, or useful was a source of unease.
The fables or fictions that were held by many to be the essence of poetry attracted much learned attention. The simplest solution was to dismiss the whole business of poetry as nonsense, or to relegate it to the periphery of learning: a solution adopted by the seventh-century authority Isidore of Seville (who puts poets amongst mysterious wis-

 

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dom figures such as sibyls, pagans, and gentile gods), the later Hugh of St. Victor (who classifies poetry as an appendage to the liberal arts), and many other moralists past and present. But it was inconveniently apparent that the Bible on occasion makes use of fables (e.g., Jesus' parables or the story of the trees in Judges 9:815). St. Thomas Aquinas felt that Scripture needed to be excused for this: at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae he argued that the poetic aspects of Scripture were appropriate because they made it accessible even to the unlearned. He reveals the "establishment" wariness of poetry, which required it to prove its credentials for the purposes of salvation.
Not all authorities looked so gloomily on "fables." An important saying of the early Christian writer Lactantius was quoted by Vincent of Beauvais, and taken up enthusiastically by Petrarch and Boccaccio: "the poet's job lies in the very act of transforming true things into something else by means of an indirect and figurative mode of speaking, and adding a certain beauty." This recognition that there were