Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism — Text and Context

Bacon’s Imagination vs. Rhetorical Style

Clark quotes Bacon’s Advancement of Learning to show how the philosopher redefined poetry as a product of imagination, “not tyed to the Lawes of Matter,” capable of joining or severing what nature has joined. Bacon distinguishes poetry in respect of words (style) from poetry in respect of matter (fained history), and insists the latter can be in prose or verse. Clark notes that Bacon’s focus on substance over style aligns with his attack on rhetorical sophistication. For Bacon, imagination is the organ of make-believe, imaging things that never were—a view that, Clark argues, fortunately ruled out slavish fidelity to fact as the essence of poetry. This passage reveals a key tension: between poetry as verbal ornament and poetry as imaginative fiction.

Jonson’s Structural Poetics and Rhetorical Prose

Clark traces Ben Jonson’s classicism to Sidney and to Dutch scholars like Pontanus and Heinsius, rather than directly to Italian Aristotelians. Jonson defines a poet as a maker or fainer, whose art is imitation expressing life in fit measure, numbers, and harmony. Crucially, Jonson insists that the essence of poetry lies not in verse but in fiction—so much so that he thought du Bartas “not a Poet, but a Verser.” Clark observes that Jonson was misled by the analogy of poetry and painting, calling poetry a “speaking Picture.” This leads to a static, structural conception: Jonson compares epic plot to a palace, drama to a house. Yet in style, Jonson remains rhetorical: his Timber includes a treatise on prose style, and he quotes Cicero that the poet is “the nearest Borderer upon the Orator.” Clark notes that Jonson’s section on style in oratory seems meant to serve for poetry as well, revealing a persistent rhetorical framework beneath his structural emphasis.

Medieval Traditions and the Italian Debt

Clark repeatedly positions his work as supplementing prior scholarship: where others traced English critical ideas to classical and Italian sources, he argues that English mediaeval traditions—derived from post-classical rhetoric—were equally influential, though later discarded as less enlightened. This claim appears in the preface and is borne out in his treatment of critics like Sidney and Jonson. For instance, Sidney’s Aristotelianism came via Scaliger and Minturno, while Jonson’s came via Pontanus, Heinsius, and Latin rhetoricians. Clark’s method is to show how rhetorical terminology carried with it rhetorical thinking, persisting even as critics adopted new theories. The tension between old and new, between native tradition and imported classicism, is a recurring pattern. Clark does not claim to have discovered new sources but to have shown that the English critics were “profoundly influenced” by medieval traditions—a corrective to overemphasis on Italian influence.

Clark’s study is best read as a focused argument about terminology and its conceptual baggage, not as a comprehensive history. Readers should attend to how he uses quotations from Bacon, Jonson, and others to illustrate the persistence of rhetorical thinking beneath apparent shifts in theory. The excerpts suggest that Clark is particularly interested in the tension between poetry as fiction and poetry as verse, and between structure and style. His insistence on medieval traditions as a counterweight to Italian influence is a distinctive claim worth testing against the full text.

Clark’s quiet insistence that medieval roots, not just Italian flair, shaped Sidney’s thinking reminded me of another layer beneath the surface—folk voices persisting in formal verse. His careful untangling of terms feels like tending an old garden, and it stirred a memory of reading Servian Popular Poetry — Context and Discussion, where unwritten traditions similarly hold their ground against learned histories. Both leave me pondering what we inherit silently, beyond what we name aloud.