Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor

Abstract

My subject is the concept of poetic imagination in the Renaissance as it relates to metaphysical claims on the one hand and to a philosophy of language on the other.* I mean to search for this imagination not only in a few obvious, explicit statements found in the usual theoretical documents but, more important for me, in the language, metaphysics, and implied poetics found in certain rather extraordinary poems. I hope, before I am done, to alter considerably our conventional notion about what the Renaissance mind was capable of conceiving. And I hope that what those concepts themselves were capable of can be shown to be useful to us as we go through our own theoretical wranglings about the relation between language and concepts and between language and things as well as about the arbitrary nature of linguistic signs and the principles behind them of absence and presence, difference and identity. Perhaps our own semiological notions may profit from a newly discovered sophistication in the semiology of Renaissance writers.