8 - Poetics

Summary

THE PLACE OF POETRY AMONG THE SCIENCES

The preceding six chapters have illuminated the parallelisms between the Anticlaudianus and the Confessio amantis: both poems are fables of the soul, in which the impetus of the soul to reach its own perfection, or form, determines the narrative form taken by both poems – in both works the form of the soul determines the form of the narrative. Alan and Gower are writing in humanist traditions of self-information, in which knowledge of the self requires ‘scientific’ information, by which the soul can place itself in the cosmos and in society; accordingly, both poems work within disciplinary structures, in which politics plays a prominent role. Alan the Neo-Platonist, certainly, is working within a ‘broader’ spectrum of disciplines, which seeks to realize and harmonize the inter-relations between the practical and the theoretical sciences, whereas Gower is writing within a genuinely Aristotelian hierarchy, with politics being the science to which ethics and economics tend.

What place can there be for the ‘science’ of poetry in poems that give such high profile to ‘scientific’ knowledge, and whose very structure is determined, in part, by hierarchies of the sciences? In the relatively rare instances where poetry is given a place within hierarchies of knowledge from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, that place tends to be fairly humble. In poems that are so sensitive to hierarchies of knowledge, we might therefore expect poetry to fare badly.