Abstract
T his study is centered on Renaissance conceptions of the poetic image and its relevance for the verbal and visual arts in general and for the poetry of John Milton in particular. In reexamining this subject I shall consider the complex relationships existing between reality and poetic invention in Renaissance theory: the paradoxical efficacy of falsehood as a mirror of truth in exemplum and allegory; the role of the imagination as an image-making faculty instrumental in both literature and painting; and, finally, the notion of truth as a Delphic riddle resistant to verbal and visual depiction yet powerfully conveyed through the greatest poetry. Especially notable are the polemical contexts of much of this body of aesthetic theory and the persistent but sometimes contradictory influence of Plato. For many, perhaps most, of Milton's near contemporaries, a poem was a kind of enchanted mirror: an artfully constructed fiction that might nevertheless serve as an image of and vehicle of reality. Bound neither by the facts of history nor the realities of nature, the poet might nevertheless teach, delight, and move his reader to embrace the truth through his fictive images. Both in theory and in practice, Renaissance conceptions of the relationships between the poetic image or idol and the realities that the latter professed to imitate or shadow showed remarkable diversity. Ranging widely between the poles of scrupulous verisimilitude and seemingly unlicensed fantasy, they exhibited a complex and variable mixture of moral or historical fact and free, imaginative invention. In the alchemy of art, diverse poets or theorists might prefer to combine much the same elements and constituents, but they combined these components in very different proportions. Even in the same poem the modern reader may detect (if it is permissible to vary one's metaphor) a sort of sliding scale of reality-an epistemological slide-rule that involves diverse (and sometimes incompatible) degrees of fiction and truth.
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