Gavin Alexander (ed.),William Scott: The Model of Poesy.

Abstract

‘I have led you into all the several rooms of poetry and pointed you to the least twig and scion of this fair plant.’ So wrote William Scott in the summer of 1599 in this previously unpublished treatise, making a virtue of the mixed metaphor to show that poetry is both a built and an organic form. Structural metaphors and terms abound in this newly edited literary treatise, most prominently perhaps that of the title. Model was a fairly new word in English, meaning ‘plan, likeness, and object of imitation’, and in Scott’s usage it also implies Neoplatonic and Aristotelian senses of idea, universal, form, and example. Alexander comments that ‘the relation of model to poesy runs both ways in Scott’s title: we can model poesy and poesy can make models’. Scott believes that poetry might help develop civil society; he develops the common Horatian idea of poetry as educational in appealingly direct terms with ‘poesy as the porter’ standing at the ‘door of delight’ by which ‘knowledge and civility’ enter. Thus he sees some quite literal models to emulate in contemporary literature: ‘The Arcadia hath excellently limbed the dances of all virtues and affections. Bartas his Judith is a worthy pattern of a religiously trained and virtuously living woman’. Inspired by Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy , Scott wrote a manual which is also an apology. Scott makes clear that he assumes a highly literate reader, and one that is already predisposed to learning: ‘we presume that every undertaker in our faculty be a general good scholar. … Then shall we need to prescribe those rules only which are peculiarly by him to be observed inasmuch as he is a poet’.