SOURCE: Brink, J. R. “The Rhetorical Structure of Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum.” Yearbook of English Studies 4 (November 1974): 52-61.

In the following essay, Brink analyzes the structure of Nosce Teipsum in terms of the rhetorical theory of Davies's day.

Although respected by poets like Pope, Coleridge, T. S. Eliot, and Theodore Roethke, Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum has not fared well in modern academic criticism.¹ Scholars have concentrated almost entirely upon identifying possible classical and continental sources for the poem.² Alexander Grosart, Davies's nineteenth-century editor, initiated this quest for sources by claiming that the content of Nosce Teipsum was highly original. The effect of making originality the central critical issue, however, has been to shift attention from the specific form of the poem to its general intellectual background. In addition, Nosce Teipsum is a very long poem containing one elegy of forty-five stanzas and another of 436 stanzas. Understandably...