Self and Symbolism in the Poetry of Michelangelo, John Donne and Agrippa D’Aubigne

127 Pages·1973·8.35 MB·English

by  Alma B. Altizer (auth.)

SELF AND SYMBOLISM IN THE POETRY OF
MICHELANGELO, JOHN DONNE, AND
AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
Series Minor
10
ALMA B. ALTIZER
SELF AND SYMBOLISM IN THE POETRY OF
MICHELANGELO, JOHN DONNE, AND
AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE
Directors: P. Dibon (Paris) and R. Popkin (Univ. of California, La Jolla)
Editorial board: J. Aubin (Paris); J. Collins (St. Louis Univ.); P. Costabel (Paris);
A. Crombie (Oxford); I. Dambska (Cracow); H. de la Fontaine-Verwey (Amsterdam);
H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); T. Gregory (Rome); T. E. Jessop
(Hull); P. O. Kristeller (Columbia Univ.); Elisabeth Labrousse (Paris); S. Lindroth
(Upsala); A. Lossky (Los Angeles); J. Orcibal (Paris); I. S. Revaht (paris); J. Roger
(Paris); H. Rowen (Rutgers Univ., N.J.); G. Sebba (Emory Univ., Atlanta); R.
Shackleton (Oxford); J. Tans (Groningen); G. Tonelli (Binghamton, N.Y.).
SELF AND SYMBOLISM
IN THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO,
JOHN DONNE,
AND AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE
by
ALMA B. ALTIZER
•
MARTINUS NIJHOFF / THE HAGUE! 1973
© [973 by Martinus Nijhojf, The Hague, Netherlands
Softcover reprint oft he hardcover 1st edition 1973
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-1551-0 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-2459-4
DOl: /0.1007/978-94-010-2459-4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION VII
Chapter I. MICHELANGELO
Chapter II. D'A UBIGNE 44
Chapter III. JOHN DONNE 69
CONCLUSION 101
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 109
INTRODUCTION
Alienation, ecstasy, death, rebirth: in the poetry of Michelangelo, Donne,
and d'A ubigne these archetypal themes make possible the ultimate
formulation of new poetic symbolizations of self and world. As their
poetry evolves from a primarily rhetorical towards a fully symbolic
mode, images of loss of self (in ecstasy or in alienation), of death and
rebirth, recur with increasing frequency and intensity. Whether the context
is love poetry or religious poetry, the basic problem remains the same;
love is the link between the two kinds of poetry. And love is indeed a
problem for these three poets, since it involves the self in relation to the
"other," the other being either God or another human being. Increasingly,
the work of each poet centers on a need to analyze or abolish the gulf
separating subject and object, self and other.
The dominant mode of most of the three poets' work is neither
rhetorical nor symbolic, but expressive. This transitional mode reveals
the individual poet's most urgent concerns and conflicts, his sense of self
in Its most isolated or burdensome, affirmative or struggling state. Under
lying most of their poems is a profound self-consciousness - a heightened
awareness of self as a powerful, separate entity, with a corresponding
objectification of all reality outside of self.
The Renaissance in general is a time of increasing individualism and
self-consciousness.1 And the late Renaissance (beginning in Italy in the
early sixteenth century, in France in the late sixteenth century, and in
England in the early seventeenth century) is a time when revolutionary
challenges to medieval modes of faith, understanding and society
intensify this growing self-consciousness. By the sixteenth century the
1 See, for example, Erost Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renais
sance Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964) and Jacob Burckhardt,
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London:
Phaidon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1944).
VIII INTRODUCTION
synthesis of Christian dogma and Oassical philosophy and science is
becoming problematic for many, as its symbolizations fail to encompass
the new complexity of social, political, religious, and scientific events.!
By the mid-sixteenth century, a sizeable body of literature expresses the
awareness of a divorce between reality as symbolized by religion and
society and reality as experienced by the individual.
This sense of estrangement from prevailing modes of symbolization
manifests itself in the poetry of Michelangelo, Donne, and d'Aubigne
at first as a search for a poetic language capable of evoking the often
frustrating, always complex relationships between self and other. But in
the end the isolated self is transformed through its very participation in
the search itself, in the imaginative, poetic process. The task becomes not
merely to record the breakdown of symbolizations, but to create a "new"
image of reality, new in the sense of going beyond or behind established
symbolizations to find a new symbolic union of self and other. This new
union is grounded in experience itself - self-transformation in its various
forms - rather than in a given pre-conception. Although each poet has
his own perspective and is preoccupied with his own set of symbols, each
of them finally attains a fully symbolic mode. The following chapters
explore the role of selfhood in this movement toward a new poetic image
of reality.
The earliest work of Michelangelo, Donne, and d'Aubigne is rooted in
another kind of self-consciousness, more stylistic than philosophic. This
phenomenon is most accurately described as formal or rhetorical Manner
ism; its major characteristics are a preoccupation with virtuosity, in
vention, subtlety, and artificiality. Ernst Robert Curtius has demon
strated that this kind of Mannerism dates back to Late Antiquity and
reappears in the Latin Middle Ages; 3 but the techniques of our three
poets come also via Petrarch and his Italian imitators. In his tum,
Petrarch had incorporated into his lyric poetry many literary conventions
of the Provenc;al courtly society of the thirteenth and fourteenth centu
ries, where the term "maniera" corresponded roughly to "savoir-faire" or
sophistication.4 By the middle to late sixteenth century, conventions and
attitudes of rhetorical Mannerism are widespread throughout France and
2 Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Scribner, 1950) and
Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of
Modern Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).
S Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans.
Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), pp. 273-93.
4 John Sheannan, "Maniera as an Aesthetic Ideal," in The Renaissance and
Mannerism: Studies in Western Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963),
II, 202-208.
INTRODUCTION IX
England. In the name of invention or virtuosity, poets attempt to refine
or rejuvenate traditional conventions and forms, creating the ingenious
images and turns of thought commonly called "conceits." The rhetorical
mode from which Michelangelo, Donne, and d'A ubigne begin their poetic
evolution thus involves the manipulation or reworking of traditional
themes, images and poetic devices in what can only be called a self
conscious manner. In this context, the work of these three poets stands
out as a search for authenticity and new forms of imagination in the
midst of contrivance and outworn poetic expression.
For reasons both pragmatic and theoretical, each of the following
chapters centers on the poet's use of conceits, in terms of type, function
and meaning. In addition to being a principal characteristic of most late
Renaissance lyric poetry, the conceit is also a form that, potentially at
least, gets to the very heart of the poetic process itself. The conceit as it
is discussed in the following chapters provides a means of synthesizing
matters of technique, intellect, psychology, and spirituality in the name
of the more encompassing, more fundamental concept "imagination."
This rather unusual usage of the term "conceit" is based on the history
of the word itself and on certain conceptual distinctions which are im
plicit in its history. Before proceeding to the textual analysis, it is neces
sary to clarify certain key terms and concepts.
One of the sources of confusion within criticism of sixteenth and seven
teenth century poetry is that there is no clear, commonly accepted mean
ing of the word "conceit." A conceit is not simply an unusual metaphor;
neither is it merely a "fanciful, ingenious, or witty notion or expression
... a far-fetched turn of thought" - although it has appeared often enough
in these forms.5 As its etymology clearly indicates, the meaning of the
word has shifted from an emphasis on the act of thinking or conceiving
itself to an emphasis on the manner in which a thought is expressed. It
has also shifted from the act of conceiving, apprehending or under
standing in general to the notion of conceiving ingenious or witty ideas,
thoughts or images. It is during the sixteenth century that these shifts
begin to occur, apparently in connection with the poet's heightened self
consciousness and the growing emphasis on virtuosity and wit or
"ingenio. "
More importantly, these shifts indicate a new split between thought and
imagination,6 which in early sixteenth century Italian were unified in the
5 These definitions and the etymological interpretations come from the Oxford
English Dictionary.
6 This split between thought and imagination is not to be confused with T. S.
Eliot's notion of "dissociation of sensibility," involving a split between thought
and feeling.
x INTRODUCTION
word "concetto." In Michelangelo's work, for example, "concetto"
retains the connotation of "thought" or "idea," but it means a thinking
in forms or images, rather than an idea arrived at by a critical or analytic
process of logic or reason. Battaglia's Grande Dizionario della lingua
italiana shows that "concetto" is not used to indicate a rhetorical figure
until Tasso, in the mid-sixteenth century. The English word "conceit,"
in its rhetorical sense, derives from the later meaning of the Italian
"concetto"; but it seems to have merged with the older meaning of
"conceit," formed from "conceive" on the analogy supplied by "receive"
... "receipt," etc.
As Curtius points out, the sixteenth and seventeenth century words
"agudeza," "ingenio," and "concepto" are related notions. Likewise, the
Spanish terms "conceptismo" and "cultismo" cannot be truly separated.
By the middle to late sixteenth century, a conceit or "concetto" is an
"acute" or ingenious mode of expression; it is a product of "agudeza,"
"ingenio" or "wit," words which are becoming more and more narrowly
defined.7 The result is to reinforce the split between thought and im
agination, making thought ever more analytic and increasingly dissociated
from that "faculty to intuit ... and to apprehend things directly" which
was once the definition of "ingegno." 8
It would be well to consider the conceit in its earlier as well as its later
identity, as a poetic device and an imaginative-intellectual process. This
would mean that on the one hand the conceit is an ingenious or witty
mode of expression; on the other hand, it is an act of intuition, a direct
apprehension of underlying forms of experience. But since no poetic
device can be created without some kind of mental process, we have to
distinguish between two different kinds of poetic conceit produced by
two different kinds of mental process. The first kind of conceit could
then be defined as an ingenious or witty imaginative-conceptual figure
created by reformulating traditional images or ideas, in which the images
or ideas that are brought together appear to be disparate or contradictory.
The figure may take the form of a pun, a metaphor, a "pointe," or a
paradoxical expression; it may be verbal or metaphorical, abstract or
sensuous. Whether it strikes the reader as outlandish or strangely "true"
depends on the reader's sensibility as well as on the poet's art, and may
vary considerably from one historic period to another.
The second kind of conceit could be defined as an imaginative-intuitive
7 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, pp. 294-95.
8 Dizionario Garzanti della lingua italiana; such Italian dictionaries, as well as
the Oxford English Dictionary, show that the meaning of "ingegno" and "in
genious" changes in a pattern virtually identical to that of "concetto."
INTRODUCTION XI
figure that brings together seemingly disparate images or ideas in a unified
embodiment of a direct intuition into underlying forms of experience.
In its purest manifestation, it underlies and informs an entire poem, so
that each individual witty figure appears as part of the basic insight.
Since this type of conceit is the product of the imaginative-intuitive act
associated with the older meaning of "concetto," we shall use the word
"concetto" to designate this second kind of conceit. In the following
chapters, then, "conceit" refers to the ingenious or witty poetic figures
described above, while the term "concetto" will be used to denote the
poetic embodiment of direct intuition into underlying forms of ex
perience.
This distinction between "conceit" and "concetto" allow us to follow
the evolution of each poet from a rhetorical to a symbolic mode; it
permits a discussion of technique in its most intimate relation to imagery,
theme, and form. Whereas the term "conceit" relates more closely to
technique, image, and wit, the notion of "concetto" reveals the bonds
between image and poetic process, between thought and imagination.
The distinction also lets us explore the changing role of selfhood in the
evolution toward a new poetic symbolization of reality; as the poetry
moves from conceit toward "concetto," the self participates ever more
fully in the poetic creation, until finally self-transformation appears as
the very ground out of which the "concetto" is formulated. From prob
lems of style and philology, we are thus drawn into questions of poetic
process and imagination in its most naked form.