The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [85]
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows;
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”
(1–14)
This great sonnet is deeply—and deliberately—disingenuous in its ingenuity. Disclaiming artifice, study, and literary device, it deploys them with consummate artistry. The poem is a primer in literary figures, from anadiplosis, the repetition of the last word from a previous clause or phrase at the beginning of the next, to the vivified pun on “feet” (anatomical and poetical), and finally to the professions of incapacity “helpless in my throes”; “truant pen”) and the triumphant breakthrough when the Muse dictates the manner of plain speech (“look in thy heart and write”). Significantly, it is the Muse’s speech, not the poet’s, that comes to end (and mend) the sonnet—although the Muse herself is, like Invention and stepdame Study, one of the invented personae of the poet’s text.
The naive voice in such a poem is achieved through learning, not despite it. Elizabethan and Jacobean poets were skilled in the use of rhetorical devices, having learned them in school and through the examples found in numerous rhetorical textbooks, like Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence Conteyning the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorick (1577), Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique, for the use of all suche as are studious of Eloquence, sette forth in English (1553), and George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589). Modern students may be familiar with metaphor, simile, personification, and a handful of other figures of speech, but the poetic toolbox of earlier poets contained dozens, indeed hundreds, of tropes. Recognizing them, and the twists and turns that made them new, was one of the manifold pleasures of reading. For a modern reader, the reverse is the case: the identification of tropes and figures often comes after the first and second readings of the poem, if at all, and is often associated with the classroom rather than with the immediacy of aesthetic or intellectual response.
These rhetorical treatises directly address the question of use. The poet, equipped with skills in language and style, is enabled to move in courtly circles and to affect both language and politics.23 The idea of material advancement through poetry was not an exaggeration. It was possible to overcome the disadvantages of low birth through education. Archbishop Cranmer (himself not born to the aristocracy) contended that “poor men’s children are many times endued with more singular gifts of nature … eloquence, memory, apt pronunciation, sobriety, and such like, and also commonly more apt to apply their study, than is the gentleman’s son delicately educated.”24
Puttenham’s title, The Art of English Poesy, should be inflected with a stress on the word English: he took for granted the effectiveness, importance, and art (in the largest sense, encompassing rhetorical skill, craft, politics, and eloquence) of earlier poets, both historical and divine. What he set out to do, by tracing the role of the poet through Western cultural history and “Englishing” the names of some classical literary tropes, was to define the potential use of poetry, poetics, and poets for the emerging English nation. The explanatory subtitle of Chapter 2 is “That there may be an art of our English poesy, as well as there is of the Latin and Greek”; the explanatory subtitle of Chapter 3 is “How poets were the first priests, the first prophets, the first legislators and politicians in the world”; the explanatory subtitle of Chapter 4 is “How the poets were the