Platonism in Early Modern Poetics and Spenser’s Poesis

Abstract

Outlining Platonism’s roles in early modern poetics and literary quests for the sublime, this chapter surveys relevant Italian, French, and English primary sources, whether Latin or vernacular. It distinguishes antipoetic usages of Platonism from “literary Platonism” (Platonizing approaches favorable to imaginative fiction, and their expression in the theory and practice of poetics). To define the latter, three main alternatives are compared: Horatian and Aristotelian poetics, and condemnation of poetry. Six sections address central themes of Platonizing literary advocacy: the true poet’s furor, worthy poetry’s uplifting beauty, its “cosmopoesis” or representation of the cosmos, its legitimacy because of its benefits to readers and communities, its powers of revealing truth through idealized mimesis, and its characteristic allegorism. Each section concludes by examining the Elizabethan literary context accordingly. Knowledge of Renaissance literary Platonism profoundly changes our understanding of the period’s poetics and major fictions, their cultural context, and their reception.