Disciplining creativity: habit, system, and the logic of late sixteenth-century poetics

Journal article

William Scott’s recently rediscovered 'Model of Poesy' (1599) articulates a poetics carefully structured according to rules provided by contemporary logic. In so doing, it meets expectations about the nature and teaching of the arts that are frequently acknowledged but rarely fulfilled by other sixteenth-century works of literary theory. This article traces the outlines of a latent debate about the proper teaching of the art of poetry through the corpus of early modern English poetics, focussing in particular on the way different texts (by Gascoigne, Puttenham, Sidney, Harvey, Harington and others) negotiate the tension between poetics as a systematic representation of literary technique and poetics as a dynamic habit or skill resistant to clear and comprehensive theory. The article sets this debate in the wider context of the European poetics on which many English writers drew, with special reference to Julius Caesar Scaliger’s 'Poetices Libri Septem' (1561). Scholars of continental poetics have long recognised that early modern literary theory needs to be understood as a practice informed by logical and methodological procedures borrowed from other humanistic and philosophical disciplines; this approach has not generally been available to those working on English material, but the recovery of Scott’s 'Model' offers new opportunities for the literary historian.

Authors: Hetherington, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
• Journal: Parergon
• Volume: 33
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 43-66
• Publication date: 2016-01-01
• Acceptance date: 2016-10-06
• DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2016.0130
• EISSN: 1832-8334
• ISSN: 0313-6221