A DISCOURSE OF POETS

From ‘The Heroic Enthusiasts’

Cicada—­Say, what do you mean by those who vaunt themselves of myrtle and laurel?

Tansillo—­Those may and do boast of the myrtle who sing of love:  if they bear themselves nobly, they may wear a crown of that plant consecrated to Venus, of which they know the potency.  Those may boast of the laurel who sing worthily of things pertaining to heroes, substituting heroic souls for speculative and moral philosophy, praising them and setting them as mirrors and exemplars for political and civil actions.

Cicada—­There are then many species of poets and crowns?

Tansillo—­Not only as many as there are Muses, but a great many more; for although genius is to be met with, yet certain modes and species of human ingenuity cannot be thus classified.

Cicada—­There are certain schoolmen who barely allow Homer to be a poet, and set down Virgil, Ovid, Martial, Hesiod, Lucretius, and many others as versifiers, judging them by the rules of poetry of Aristotle.

Tansillo—­Know for certain, my brother, that such as these are beasts.  They do not consider that those rules serve principally as a frame for the Homeric poetry, and for other similar to it; and they set up one as a great poet, high as Homer, and disallow those of other vein and art and enthusiasm, who in their various kinds are equal, similar, or greater.

Cicada—­So that Homer was not a poet who depended upon rules, but was the cause of the rules which serve for those who are more apt at imitation than invention, and they have been used by him who, being no poet, yet knew how to take the rules of Homeric poetry into service, so as to become, not a poet or a Homer, but one who apes the Muse of others?

Tansillo—­Thou dost well conclude that poetry is not born in rules, or only slightly and accidentally so:  the rules are derived, from the poetry, and there are as many kinds and sorts of true rules as there are kinds and sorts of true poets.

Cicada—­How then are the true poets to be known?

Tansillo—­By the singing of their verses:  in that singing they give delight, or they edify, or they edify and delight together.

Cicada—­To whom then are the rules of Aristotle useful?

Tansillo—­To him who, unlike Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, and others, could not sing without the rules of Aristotle, and who, having no Muse of his own, would coquette with that of Homer.