Disciplining Creativity: Habit, System, and the Logic of Late Sixteenth-Century Poetics

Abstract

Quid est Potica? Est facultas ben scribendi uersus'. 1 We need only consider for a moment the limitations of this definition, and the range of available alternatives furnished by early modern European writers on the subject, to remind ourselves how varied and how undisciplined the discipline of poetics was in the period addressed by the articles in this issue. This particular definition is furnished by Johann Thomas Freige, a German follower of the French logician and pedagogic reformer Petrus Ramus; Freige is heeding the dictates of his master in offering statements and precepts of immense clarity and simplicity. Ramus never wrote a textbook on poetics, and when Freige and other followers remedied this lack as they tried to complete his curricular project they produced treatises of rather limited scope: they tended to deal only with matters of versification, because other elements of poetic practice -particularly the invention and arrangement of material -were addressed by other arts, namely logic and rhetoric. 2 The reasons for writing about poetics in this way themselves arose from the discipline of logic, and specifically from its role in regulating the formulation and teaching of the arts. Ramus understood arts as collections of precepts, formulated and arranged according to rules borrowed, somewhat illicitly, from Aristotle's work on the logic of syllogistic demonstration. As a result of this logical clarity and restraint, each art -as a body of theory, but not in practice -was supposed to be discrete and self-sufficient, a methodically structured representation of human competence easily assimilated by students. 3 The works on poetics produced in obedience to this methodology are, predictably enough, rather thin and disappointing, having been suffocated by misguided rigour. Nevertheless, the idea that gave rise to these works -namely, that it should be possible to write about the poetic art in a coherent and logical way -was potent and widespread in the sixteenth century. George Puttenham, for example, defends not only the vernacular literature he sought to describe and encourage but also his own activity as a literary theorist by arguing that English poetics might be 'reduced into a method of rules and precepts' or 'a certain order of rules prescribed by reason and gathered by experience'; and William Scott explicitly offers 1 Johann Thomas Freige, Paedagogus (Basel: Sebastian Henricpetri, 1582), sig. i2r: 'What is poetics? It is the faculty of writing verses well'.