SOURCE: Scott, Peter Dale. “Alcuin as a Poet: Rhetoric and Belief in His Latin Verse.” University of Toronto Quarterly 33, no. 3 (April 1964): 233-57.

In the following essay, Scott credits Alcuin for helping shape the evolution toward a modern role for poetry, in which formal rhetoric is subordinated to a functional role within the structure of the poem.

Much has been written in our century about the question of belief in poetry, and much about the question of rhetoric. I hope in this article to deal with both these aspects of convention (nomos) or habit: rhetoric being considered as linguistic convention or habit, and belief as a habituation of the mind. Style, which begins as a mode of persuasion or appeal to belief, eventually becomes transfixed in an exploration of linguistic habit for its own sake; but a period subjected to appreciable cultural and social change will ultimately come to...