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4 - The assimilation of Aristotle's Poetics in sixteenth-century Italy

from READING AND INTERPRETATION: AN EMERGING DISCOURSE OF POETICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Daniel Javitch
Edited by
Glyn P. Norton
Glyn P. Norton
Affiliation:
Williams College, Massachusetts
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Summary

Italian men of letters in the mid-sixteenth century were the first to promulgate the idea that Aristotle's Poetics was a central and traditional text of ancient poetic theory. One of the ways they did so was by conflating and harmonizing Aristotle's treatise with Horace's Ars poetica, the one text which had enjoyed a relatively uninterrupted fortune in Western Europe as a digest of ancient poetic art. Vincenzo Maggi (Madius), one of the very first Cinquecento commentators on the Greek treatise, maintained that Horace's epistle to the Pisos was a stream flowing from the Aristotelian spring of the Poetics. Maggi actually appended a commentary on the Ars poetica to the one he provided on Aristotle's Poetics in order to reveal Horace's ‘obscure and subtle imitation’ of the Greek philosopher's treatise. This fictive genealogy was meant, in turn, to make uniform and therefore more authoritative two ancient views of poetry that were, indeed, quite different.

Aristotle's view of poems in terms of the inherent or internal requirements of their forms was a minority view in the ancient world. Most ancient critics (Horace, among them) measured the effectiveness and value of a poetic work in terms of external standards of truthfulness and of morality, and not by the degree to which it contributed to realizing what Aristotle took to be its particular form and function. Moreover, the rhetorical orientation of these critics made them preoccupied with the conditions imposed by the audience and not, as was Aristotle, with the composition of coherent structures which produced certain emotions because of inherent and objective properties.

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The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 53 - 65
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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