Boccaccio on Poetry

 

 References to Boccaccio in parentheses specify the book and section of the Genealogia deorum gentilium.  I used the edition translated, introduced, and edited by Charles Osgood which contains only the poetic theory contained in the XIV and XV books under the title Boccaccio on Poetry.  Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.

 

     Most medieval literary theory is couched in the language of rhetoric, inherited from ancient authorities like Cicero,  Quintilian, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum.  Works by Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland focused on figures of speech, thought, and sound, a tradition continued in the Renaissance by scholars like Puttenham and Peacham.  Many moderns are unsympathetic to such an approach as it eschews the emphases on originality, individuality, and inspiration we have inherited from the Romantics.  Yet ancients and moderns alike assert poetry’s special capacity to embody the truth.  Whereas rhetoric is linked with sophism and often suspected of subverting piety and moral order (by Plato and others), poetry has since archaic times been thought in some sense divine and the source of knowledge, spirituality, and moral behavior.  Many ancient authors accepted the Horatian formula that poetry must delight and instruct [1], and, indeed, some modern critics [2] maintain the idea that reading literature makes people better, not merely wiser, but more moral. 

     The concern with theme, what the writer implies about lived experience, and the idea that poetry can uplift readers spiritually, morally, and intellectually is central to Boccaccio’s defense of poetry against critics to whom all non-Christian art is frivolous and probably sinful.  To him even the pagan poets are sources of religious knowledge, albeit with vision limited by not knowing Christ (XIV, 8).  “Poetry devotes herself to something greater [than pursuit of money]; for while she dwells in heaven, and mingles with the divine counsels, she moves the minds of a few men from on high to a yearning for the eternal, lifting them by her loveliness to high reverie” (XIV, 4).  While they lack the inspiration the Holy Ghost lent sacred writers, they are similarly elevated by “mere energy of mind,” for which reason they are called “seers” (XIV, 8).  To him all literature is “a form of discourse which, under guise of invention, illustrates or proves an idea” (XIV, 9).  Poets are then “stimulators of virtue” (XIV, 15) and their works are “maidservants of Philosophy” (XIV, 18).  They may be at time obscure (XIV, 12), and their words may bear multiple meanings [3] (XIV, 12), but these difficulties serve the representation of complex truths.  For him the “sap of Philosophy” runs throughout imaginative literature (XIV, 10).  In his grand (if irritable) polemical style, those who cannot see the real meaning in poetry are denounced as “fools,” “madmen,” “blind,” idiots,” and the like.

     The basis for his analysis is the claim that myths, like poetry, are always allegorical, in the broadest sense of saying something other than the literal content.  This is the nature of rhetorical figures as a whole, and for Boccaccio myth always signifies something other than the apparent meaning. Fiction is for him “far from superficial”; it possesses always a “hidden truth” (XIV, 9).  For him the primary exception to literature’s noble role is certain comic writers whom he repeatedly dismisses as altogether pernicious, really sub-literary.

     Boccaccio’s defense of poetry occurs in the prefaces to the fourteenth and fifteenth books of his magnum opus, the Genealogia deorum gentilium (On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles) a massive attempt to set forth systematically the entire body of Classical mythology.  Boccaccio clearly regarded this as his magnum opus.  He expanded and revised the book over a period of fifteen years until his death, and it proved popular then for several hundred years.  The text was copied as a whole in forty-seven manuscripts and in part in many more.  The printed editio princeps appeared in 1472, followed by at least seven other editions in Latin before 1532 as well as translations into modern European languages.  Neglected now, it was long his best-known work. 

     Boccaccio’s ambition for this fifteen-volume work of scholarship goes well beyond providing information in a convenient form.  The understanding of Classical mythology for him was far more than a source of ornamentation for poets; it was a route to truth.  Whereas Thomas Bulfinch and Edith Hamilton primarily wished to make allusions explicable to modern readers, Boccaccio saw in myth something truer than true, something sublime and transcendent.  Mythic systems are all encyclopedic; they aim to account for all phenomena.  This is true of Babylonian, Egyptian, Germanic, Yoruba, and Hindu myths as well as those of ancient Greece and Rome.  Though their truths are always symbolic and poetic, they are nonetheless accurate.  Thus to master a mythological system is, in theory, to understand the world.  This all-inclusive hunger for vision explains why the book is so long and complex.  Long before the nineteenth century higher criticism distinguished between the J, E, and P versions of the Hebrew god, Boccaccio had differentiated three different Joves. 

     Mythology is one part of a program of Liberal Arts education, a term that yet survives though in practice such general training has been largely displaced in higher education by vocational courses.  For Boccaccio a Liberal Arts curriculum is required to develop “a wonderful keenness of mind” that leads to “the very inner mysteries of sacred philosophy” (XIV, 9).  Victorians justified the study of Classical languages as a sort of calisthenics for the brain, a preparation for the sort of problem-solving one encounters in everyday life, but for Boccaccio familiarity with Greek and Latin literature provided enlightenment directly.  In today’s decay of general culture and wide-open dispute about values, with the crassest material index, money, by far the most generally accepted, one might do worse than to immerse oneself in Homer and Vergil.

     Boccaccio was simply following the taste of his day in seeking to salvage the beauties of ancient poetry by claiming a moral purpose in the fanciful and sometimes racy stories of the gods.  In his own fourteenth century the L’Ovide Moralisé appeared provided thematic readings consistent with Christianity for the old stories of transformation.  Other examples of this pervasive approach to Classical mythology fill John Gower’s Confessio Amantis.  Gower concludes his treatment of the story of Actaeon (admittedly one of the stories more most amenable to a Christianized interpretation) with this cautionary warming.

 

Lo now, my Sone, what it is

A man to cast his yhe amis,

which Acteon hath dere aboght

Be war forthi and do it noght.

                                        (I, 379-382)

 

Many of the readings found there are similar to Boccaccio’s commentaries.  Both for instance, see the story of Apollo and Daphne as a cautionary tale warning against sexual indulgence and praising chastity and restraint. 

     The most common strategies Boccaccio adopts are euhemerism and moralizing.  For instance, he first glosses the story of Antaeus whom Hercules defeated by holding him in the air, out of contact with the earth, as an account of a historical king who founded the city of Tinge (Tangiers) who was so skilled at wrestling that he might be seen to draw strength from standing on the earth.  He then provides the ethical reading, saying that the earth here signifies such “lower” impulses as lust which can be defeated with discipline (I, 13).

     Some of his notions are more fanciful than others.  Venus’ attendant nymph Peristera may reasonably be considered to have been inspired by a “famous Corinthian prostitute,” yet the association of her nymphs with “the perpetual moisture in which the moon abounds” is pure whimsy, and no scholar would accept the derivation of the goddess’ name from “venam rem,” “an empty thing” (V, 2).  Yet even the more extravagant interpretations are significant, of Boccaccio’s vision if not of the ancients’.  The reader might regard his wilder speculations as the effervescence of intellectual ferment, not so different from some inventive post-structuralist readings.

     Moderns may lack the moral certainty that allows Boccaccio to distinguish “good muses,” “worthy of praise and reverence,” from “bad” ones, “obscene and detestable” (XIV, 20) [4], but many cling to the notion that literature improves the individual.  As this defense of art has been asserted since ancient times and Boccaccio adds little to the claim, the primary interest of moderns in his analysis in the Genealogia is instead his argument on behalf of the study of myth, believing, in a medieval anticipation of commentators like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, that such apparently fanciful and factually erroneous stories may encode profound wisdom and his broader belief that the study of the Liberal Arts exercises the mind in such a way as to elevate students’ behavior as well as their cognitive skills.  To him the sublime, a moral as well as an aesthetic category, is accessible through the language of mythology and the stories of the ancients provide the most complete, beautiful, and true symbolic representation of reality.

  

1.  Though present in earlier writers including Aristotle, this dictum is traditionally ascribed to Horace whose Epistle ad Pisonem states the concept several times.  “The poet strives to delight and help, at the same time to be pleasant and serviceable”  ("Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae."), “the useful and the sweet mixed” ("miscuit utile dulci"),  and "giving pleasure and admonitions" ("delectando pariterque monendo").  Sir Philip Sidney makes the same claim central in his “Defense of Poesy” as do many writers such as Matthew Arnold since.

 2.  Such views are today marginal.  See, for example, my brother James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative or psychologist Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angles of Our Nature.

 3.  Boccaccio several times delineates these varieties of interpretation, relying (though not absolutely) on the four-fold system of Biblical hermeneutics derived from Jewish practices, elaborated in Origen’s Quadriga, and refined by Augustine.  See XIV, 13.

4.  It is more revelatory about the Catholic Church and European culture than about poetry in general that the main moral deficiencies Boccaccio notes seem to be sexual misdeeds.

The Archaeology of Gray’s “The Progress of Poetry”

     One thinks casually of eighteenth-century Augustan literature as highly formal and conventional, its values derived from that age of Roman antiquity which was already belatedly looking backward toward the Greek. The learned classical references that ornament the poetry of the period may seem to be decorative only, signs of allegiance to the lofty standards of the ancient masters, a sort of pretty upper-class language that operated almost like slang, to indicate in shorthand fashion a background and values shared by many European intellectuals. Though Gray’s “The Progress of Poetry” contains numerous references that could be described in this way, there is a deeper, more archaic layer of mythology in his account. Embodying many traits of the nascent Romantic movement and familiar (as very few in earlier eras had been) with the oral poetries of traditional societies, Gray uses mythology in a passionate, intuitive, and personal way at the same time that he observes the usage accepted, even required, from poets in his day. While the conventional allusions support the straightforward burden of the poem as an account of poetry’s history from Classical times through the Middle Ages up to his own day, indeed to himself, this deeper personal level of mythology suggests an altogether different theme.
     Gray was an excellent Classical scholar, spending much of his life as a fellow at Cambridge. His familiarity with both Greek and Latin literature was far beyond that required to make the gestures toward antiquity that were de rigeur in his day. Such references as those in the opening stanza of “The Progress of Poetry” to the Aeolian lyre and to Helicon are as graceful and informative, if as lacking in originality, as the many similar allusions in other authors. The first of these images has a specific meaning significant in Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” but here it is largely conventional, signifying little more than poetry in general. Using such terms at the outset of a poem establishes the writer’s bona fides as a scholar qualified to compose poetry.
     Yet Gray is clearly, with Thomson, Collins, and Cowper, a precursor of Romanticism. The very fact of his imitating Pindar, rather than, like Samuel Johnson, Horace, is evidence for the revaluation taking place. Pindar’s poems are more open in form and associative in logic, spraying mythological names with abandon and daring the reader to keep up. His awareness, imperfect as it may have been, of the pre-Christian oral poetry Celtic, Norwegian, and Welsh, as well as from Lapland and America distinguishes him from earlier critics who would have felt such “primitive” poetry to be necessarily inferior. Further, his sympathetic ear equates with poetry the sounds of awakening nature, the “thousand rills,” the “laughing flowers,” the whole “rich stream of music,” he can hear “rebellow to the roar.” Thus the whole generative engine of nature is incorporated into his own verses.
     Somewhat optimistically Gray notes the power of art to make life livable, banishing “sullen Cares.” In a clear expression of the Romantic politics of radical dissent, he claims that poetry is associated with “Freedom’s holy flame,” ignoring the centuries-long association of art with the ruling class.
     In spite of such sympathetic approaches to Romantic ideals, Gray was criticized by Wordsworth in the seminal statement of Romantic poetic theory, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, for his inauthentic “curiously elaborate” language distant from that of ordinary prose in his “Sonnet” on the death of Richard West, surely one of Gray’s most strongly-felt compositions. While there is little doubt that Gray’s emotion was genuine and profound, the poem’s use of Apollo is as wholly conventional.
     The same vaguely unfocused generative powers of nature that fail to console the grieving poet underlie his excited joy at the beginning of “The Progress of Poetry,” where the transference of energy in the poem is originally felt in the flow of poetry itself, which is likened to the fructifying streams. In later stanzas the same redemptive force is attributed to Aphrodite by (stanza I.3), then to the Muse (II, 2), and finally to the figure of Fancy (III, 3). The successive appearance of these representations of the divine female support the concluding image of the poet as Pindar in the form of a “Theban Eagle,” soaring to the empyrean.
     Classed as one of the “graveyard poets,” Gray’s outlook was indeed melancholy. Apart from the loss of innocence of which he complains in his Eton College ode, “The Progress of Poetry” contains a catalogue of causes of suffering “Labour, and Penury, the racks of Pain” culminating in “Death” and conquerable only by the Muse which is able to banish “Night, and all her sickly dews.”
     Gray used the conventional images of Classical learning, invoking the goddess as an ally against these universal threats to mankind, but in his mind the goddess also assumed a very individual meaning. His muse was a lover but also a maternal figure protecting him from meanness and vice. Though she is associated with nature’s reverdie, she also protects against the uncontrolled passions. In his "Hymn to Ignorance" he appeals to the goddess of not-knowing, feeling he would be far happier with less insight and regretting that he “forsook” her “fond embrace.”
     In his “Ode to Spring” Venus’ powers are inadequate to do more than provide a temporary respite from cares; in the end the poet feels himself to be “a solitary fly.” Most pointedly, in the “Ode to Adversity” he praises adversity, particularized as “Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty,” as a “rigid nurse” who teaches “Virtue” and cultivates philosophy by teaching the poet “to love and to forgive.” Though “wit” had been the byword of Pope’s generation, according to the “Hymn to Ignorance” he feels “filial reverence” for the protective value of lack of knowledge, looking with nostalgia on earlier eras when the whole world was ruled by ignorance, undeceived by “Wit’s delusive ray” which may tempt people into transgression. In “The Progress of Poetry,” art is a firewall against “frantic Passions.” For Gray the divine female, though associated with fertility and love, is paradoxically an aid in self-control. While he is attracted to the Romantic values of imagination and emotion, he is cautious and seeks to moderate these potentially explosive forces. In Gray’s greatest poems, this mythology is highly ambivalent.
     At the end of “The Progress of Poetry” the persona takes flight like an eagle, an image familiar from Pindar, imitated by Bacchylides and Horace, and thus wholly acceptable as a routine ornament. The image of the high-flying poet is, of course, far more archaic than those writers. The notion of a poet/seer flying into the air to attain wisdom is one of the most common shamanistic tropes. Gray may have been wholly unaware of these archaic usages, but he reenacts them for the eighteenth century in his odes.
     Thus he sprinkles Classical allusion over the surface of his verse like a baker adding roses of icing to a cake, but, at the same time, at a subterranean level, he expresses his moral and existential anxieties and his hope for the liberation of poetic flight into the sublime. As psychological facts these tensions imply his own mental distress and internal division, while intellectually, they suggest the conflicts associated with his writing just on the brink of Romanticism. Perhaps such ambivalence is a factor in his extraordinarily small oeuvre which amounted during his lifetime to only thirteen poems, less than a thousand lines in total. If so, the poems he did write may be all the more dense and significant, precise and beautiful, for the ambiguity they suggest, more worthy perhaps than a few thousand lines of a lesser writer’s wholly conventional verse. Though Gray turned down the position of Poet Laureate, he had in his own day and has today far more readers than Colley Cibber who held the honor for decades or William Whitehead who succeeded him.